Spanish Gringo by Michael Freeman

Don't Confuse Inbound Marketing Tools with the Methodology

2013-05-02T04:04:00.000+02:00

We've recently moved over to HubSpot at work to handle our marketing automation and assist in our Inbound Marketing efforts.

At ShoreTel, we are big fans of Inbound Marketing and believe that being customer-centric is necessary for success in the modern economy.

I was reading a post about the latest report on the State of Inbound Marketing and one of the comments really stuck with me. It was from someone called "HT" who did not like what he was reading...

HT: Blah, blah, blah. Of course Hubspot is going to create a report singing the praises of "Inbound Marketing" and making claims that "traditional marketing" is dying. Do you think they would make a report claiming the opposite? It's self-serving. Branding, messaging, targeting, promotion, service and the product itself are the drivers. Let's not fool ourselves. Without those, inbound is irrelevant. "Inbound" is but a portion of the overall marketing strategy. It does not succeed on it's own. However, as a part of an overall plan, it has its place in the big-picture. I'll be honest, I am not a fan of landing pages that require me to give you my information before you even tell me what you are offering or why it would matter to me. I'm seeing way too much of that approach lately. And that approach seems to be emphasized by inbound marketers. What you will end up by following such a tactic is a list full of unqualified leads who simply filled out a form, but only because they wanted the info to review first. I would much rather have a list of people who had the information and THEN submitted their information to me, as they would be more likely a lead that would have a better chance of actually converting. In the time that we have transitioned our marketing efforts to a more "inbound" approach it has resulted mainly in unqualified leads who only wanted more info. The rate of sales success has been very low. I could go on and on. Marketing is all encompassing: print, digital, tv, radio, outdoor, sponsorship, events, public relations, social media, etc. You have to both drive customers to you (outbound) and draw them in through inbound means. If they don't know you exist, how will they know what they are looking for? It takes both inbound and outbound strategies to be truly successful in your marketing efforts.

I think more than anything what bothered me about the comment was that HT seemed upset that Inbound is growing in influence and that HubSpot is happy to promote itself and the positive trends towards Inbound.

By the time that I saw the HubSpot post, comments were closed. So, here what I would have liked to have written to HT:

My question is, why wouldn't they? They are a leader in a rapidly growing market.

Just because a positive report on the state of Inbound Marketing benefits HubSpot, that does not make the report untrue. The reality is that customers have changed and Inbound Marketing is the best way to reach them and build profitable relationships.

I'm open to whatever comes after Inbound, but right now it's the best methodology available and until something better comes along, it's where marketers should be focusing and investing their time, resources and energy.

Inbound Marketing is a movement, not a fad.

Inbound Marketing is not a panacea nor will everyone who tries it be good at it. The same is true of traditional marketers. For every masterpiece such as "here's to the crazy ones" there are thousands of examples of schlock.

I agree with you that too many websites ask for visitor info before telling you about their company or what they do. But then again, that is not really Inbound Marketing because it is not a customer-centric approach. Just because they use some of the tools or techniques of Inbound Marketing does not mean that they are practicing good Inbound Marketing.

Do not confuse the use of Inbound Marketing tools with actually practicing Inbound Marketing as a discipline. It's very easy to buy and throw in a tool. The true value of Inbound Marketing comes from following the process and methodology. The tools are there to facilitate, enable, and make those processes more efficient. You, as the marketer, still need to decide:

Who are your customers and what they are looking for?
How to communicate the value that your company and products offer to your customers?
What steps and characteristics you and your customer go through in the funnel?
Which calls to action, offers and content are most effective?
What are the hypotheses that need to be tested?
What is the right amount of content to provide, when, where, and how to push the prospect deeper in the funnel?
etc...

For your company HT, consider lead scoring or some other process for segmenting your leads so you are only spending time on those most likely to convert. Perhaps you are gating too much content on your website. Perhaps you do not nurture your leads to identify and separate the good ones from the bad.

I hope you find a way to Inbound success.

Was Morgan Freeman recommended to me because of my name?

2013-01-24T18:48:00.000+01:00

So, yesterday I get a Google+ email with suggestions for people I should add to my circles. I was a bit surprised to see Morgan Freeman listed first in the list. I enjoy pretty much all of his movies and think he is a great actor, but I have the feeling that Google recommended him because we have the same last name. Who knows what goes on in the secret sauce of the recomendation algorithm, but this one seems a bit off. I have no idea who Brendan or Adriana are.

Perhaps Google could do something like Apple's Genius recommendations and at least give a hint as to why or how they think we are connected.

I wish Morgan Freeman were my uncle!

When living in Spain and telling people my last name, I always had to say (in Spanish) "you know, Freymann like Morgan Freymann." Sometimes I even was able to convince a few people that we were related and he was an uncle of mine (by marriage). I wish.

"I hope the pacific is as blue as it has been in my dreams. I hope." - Red

@Google: How is this a good search result for business phone system?

2013-01-14T21:03:00.001+01:00

UPDATE 01/24/13 - Cisco finally fixed their CMS. The formatting is still broken on the content but at least it is back on the page. For Google, it does not seem to matter either way because they rank #2 as if nothing ever happened.

UPDATE 01/22/13 - The Google cache has been updated to show the blank page and it still ranks #2. Amazing. Talk about giving Cisco the benefit of the doubt.

Where's the beef?

UPDATE 01/21/13 - Cisco still in position #2 and they still have an empty page! At least a week with absolutely no real content in the page, which is clearly broken. You'd think that even if Google doesn't notice the problem, Cisco would at least notice by now. Does anyone actually manage this part of their website?

UPDATE 01/17/13 - Cisco has moved up to position #2 and they still have an empty page! Both Google and Cisco are asleep at the switch on this one. It's been more than 3 days since their content has been MIA (I doubt I happened to find the page right when their CMS broke).
I wonder which will happen first:

Google will recrawl the page and update its rankings correctly
Cisco will realize that their CMS is serving up a bunch of donut pages and they'll fix it

I am getting familiar with the telecom industry in search as part of my job. Each industry has its own nuances, players, and idiosyncrasies. One thing that is common is that from time to time you will find head-scratching results in the SERPs (search engine results pages). Often it is because someone is having a bad day (site is down, CMS error, hosting provider makes a DNS mistake, etc....). Other times, it is because Google just has not yet gotten around to updating their index for a particular term. They may get to it eventually, but sometimes they are a bit slow to update the results even though the underlying content and/or competition has changed for a given topic. It is impossible for Google to stay on top of each result and each page for every term at every second of every day. But then again, when you listen to Eric Schmidt, he thinks that the whole concept of showing a list of search results is a failure.

Today, I found a good example of someone having a bad day leading to a poor search result. If you search for "business phone system" you will see Cisco listed with the #3 position in the organic results:


Nice position, there should be good content behind that link, right?

You can' always get what you want....

You would think that after clicking on that highlighted result you would be presented with some sort of wizard/set of questions to help me find the perfect phone system for my small business. You would think that wouldn't you? Well, let's see what we get instead:

This is thin content

Now, that is what I call a generous use of white space on a page layout.

My guess is that the CMS is broken or someone at Cisco has inserted some code (perhaps to trigger the chat window) which prevents the main content from displaying.

After navigating a few different pages, it looks like the problem may be pretty serious because I found multiple "empty" pages today on their site. I'm curious though at what point does Google take this into consideration into changing rankings/indexed status of such a page.

The last cached copy from Google is January 3rd, which at least did have real content in the page (not great, but at least something). So we know that it worked correctly 11 days ago, but not sure when the page stopped working correctly.

Even when working correctly, the page content did not satisfy the promise made by the headline. It listed off some features/functionality that users should consider but it did nothing to actually educate visitors on what those features mean, not the tradeoffs or factors are to consider with regard to the list of features. It also makes sure to mention that you should talk to a trusted adviser (translation - Cisco reseller). Why can't Cisco just clearly educate the visitor right on this page? Furthermore, it lists the next step as a link to learn more about Cisco's solutions, but when you get to that page it is just a list of their products without any guidance to what you should be looking to learn or how it fits together. Obviously, I am biased, but I think the content we provide is better. You be the judge.

We all have bad days

Sometimes our sites don't behave as they are supposed to. Let's just hope that if these problems persist, Google will get around to taking that into consideration in the rankings, even if the site is famous. Otherwise, that is an unfair advantage for "big" sites. Google should not protect the 1% sites any better than the 99% when mistakes are made.

You can get the Gringo out of Spain, but...

2013-01-12T01:29:00.000+01:00

I have been totally radio silent on this blog for a long time. A lot has happened since I last wrote about the Barça game:

We've left Spain and moved to the happiest place in America. Even Oprah agrees.
I've started working for ShoreTel Sky, a cloud based business VoIP service in their Marketing department. First time working from home. Required some adjustment, but so far going well.
Getting the boys settled and adapted to new schools, new house, and new language (well, at least new for them to speak outside of the house)
Surfing much more....the Pacific as a few more waves than the Mediterranean sea.
No more weekly basketball games. Switched over to futbol (soccer) instead.
Trying to pickup my tennis game when I can.

Overall, it has been a very good transition. We miss our family and friends back in España but we´re now with other family here and starting to make some new friends (as well as see some great old ones too).

Now that I have rediscovered the blog, I hope to get back to writing some more.

Need to find some time to keep improving GA Evolution. I have received some great feedback on good features. In progress, but no ETA on the next rev. Hope in the next few weeks to get the top items completed.

2013 is looking great so far and excited to see where it leads.

A Barça Game Full of Firsts & Lasts

2012-05-07T15:10:00.000+02:00

I had always said to Dante that he'd go to see a football match once he was 4 years old. We were lucky enough to get a free ticket to last week's Barça match. As luck would have it, the game would be a series of "firsts" and "lasts" for us and the team:

Last time Guardiola would coach in el Campo Nou
Last home game of the season
Last time I can probably take Diego to see a game and have him get in for free
First game ever for Dante
First game ever for all three of us together
First time for someone to break the single season scoring record in all competitions (Messi) since the 1920s
First time for someone (Messi) get to 50 league goals in a single season

90 minutes can be long for young kids, even if it is watching great football. Nevertheless, being there was special and something that I'll never forget. Thank you Eva and Xavi for getting the ticket for us.

Just me and the boys with great seats...

Distilled bookmarklet modified to support GA Custom URLs

2012-04-20T10:04:00.000+02:00

Tom Critchlow from Distilled released a bookmarklet this week that lets you instantly access the traffic stats in GA for whatever page on which you are navigating (assuming you have permission in GA of course). It works perfectly on any site with GA so long as it does not use custom URL in the _trackPageview command (well over 90% of sites).

However, for sites like ours, we were out of luck because we always use custom URLs to give us finer tuned reporting and allows us to leave URLs optimized (or at least semi-optimized with what our CMS will allow) while having detailed and optimized data for reporting and analysis.

I have modified the script to work with sites that use custom URLs for tracking in GA as well as for standard implementations.

javascript:location.href="https://www.google.com/analytics/web/#report/content-pages/INSERT-CODE-HERE/%3F_r.drilldown%3Danalytics.pagePath"+encodeURIComponent(":"+ (typeof _gat.N[0].F == "undefined" ? location.pathname : _gat.N[0].F))+"%26explorer-table.secSegmentId%3Danalytics.source/";

The key change is to substitute location.pathname from the original script and replace it with a block that checks for any custom URLs stored in GA for that page

(typeof _gat.N[0].F == "undefined" ? location.pathname : _gat.N[0].F)

The only caveat is that you are still out of luck if your use inbound filters to transform your URLs inside GA. Unfortunately, there is no easy solution other then creating a regex yourself to apply the same transformation to the URL.

Instructions for making this work on your site:
1) Go to Tom's post
2) Enter your code from GA as he mentions it in his post
3) Drag the bookmarklet to your toolbar
4) Right click the bookmarklet and edit the script by changing:
location.pathname
to
(typeof _gat.N[0].F == "undefined" ? location.pathname : _gat.N[0].F)

Change the part that says ~~location.pathname~~ to (typeof _gat.N[0].F == "undefined" ? location.pathname : _gat.N[0].F)

5) Click OK and you are good to go

GA is a bit confused this morning...

2012-04-16T11:57:00.002+02:00

GA this morning forgot its cup of coffee

I am really enjoying the new GA v5, especially as they start porting some of the remaining functionality that has been missing these last months such as PDF and email support. They even have improved the contrast in the latest iteration so I don't feel compelled to try to make GA higher contrast

One area, however, that I prefer from before was the main graph area. It used to show the comparison information from previous periods as well as percentage differences. I suppose to save CPU they decided to remove that info and only post the standard aggregate data. The scaling also really needs some improvement because they play with the labels and scale with every change of a report.

Some things though you can just chalk up to being "beta". This morning GA seems a bit confused on how to display its labels for time. Look at the screenshot below. Hours are days and days are hours....feels a bit philosophical.

Not quite up to swiss watchmaker standards...

Hope they fix this later today.

PLUS: GA Evolution is Evolving

Also, I just wanted to give a quick heads up that I am completely rewriting Google Analytics Evolution. The new version will be a responsive design in HTML5, based on Bootstrap, jQuery (of course), and the alpha (please don't break) version of the Google API Javascript Client Library. I have all of the data pieces working and now I am just finishing the presentation of the returned data.

After that I will put Flot back into the mix and I'll relaunch. This new verison will also include an option to sum/aggregate data from separate queries on the page. Nothing very sophisticated and you'll need to be careful about aggregating averages, but for people who manage multiple sites but do not have "global" profiles setup in GA this can be a time saver.

Hope to have this released in the next week or two.

Pimp My gReader Script Updated for new Google Bar

2012-02-22T16:16:00.001+01:00

Google does not seem to stop changing their ~~lame~~ new Google Bar. At least this time it was for the better by bringing back the top black bar for quick links.

Anyway, this update broke the PimpMygReader script. Well, it is now updated and all I think are fixed. The difficulty this time is that Google has decided to implement multiple css schemes depending on screen size AND browser type, so I had to make adjustments for small and larger screens for both Firefox and Google.... So much for working towards standards.

For more info, download the script and background, see the original post to improve Google Reader

Fines for surfing in the Med - what's next...You can ski, but only when it is hot in the summer?

2012-02-06T15:41:00.001+01:00

From the absurd desk comes this news....

The city of Barcelona will fine surfers for being out in the waves. This is because the surfers are considered "bathers" and all bathers must follow the posted instructions and respect the flags. Well, for the average tourist who has no idea about surfing, perhaps they should not go in the water when a red flag is posted. What City Hall (Ajuntament in catalan) does not seem to understand is that surfers need "surfable waves" in order to surf.

It is like giving fines to dancers for dancing at a dance hall because it is not safe for the people who are walking to the bar for a drink. Or fining skiers for being on the ski slopes because it is cold outside... you know less than 60ºF (15.5ºC).

The fines range from 700-1500€ per instance. This is so pathetic.

What's worse is that we are talking about the Mediterranean! This is not Hawaii, Mavericks or even Portugal.... this is the home of the "mediometrismo" (1.5 ft. sets). Although I have to say that living here has been pleasantly surprising with the amount of "surfable" days there are per year, we are still only talking 2 to 4 days a year of true overhead surf. Even then you will be hard pressed to find many DOH+ sessions near Barcelona.

I understand if they want to fine/charge people who need to be rescued, but in no way does it make sense to fine someone for being in the water exactly at the moment when they need to be in the water. Going back to the mountain example. If search and rescue need to go save you because you ignored all the signs and you get lost, OK... let them make you pay for the public services. But if you are going down the bunny hill, no one should be racing to make you pay the government.

OK, pop quiz... 1 of these surfers could be fined... guess which one:

You guessed it, the poor fella in the lower right better be reaching for his wallet...

May the wave gods help us all.

High Contrast Google Analytics is Easier to Read

2012-01-24T12:51:00.001+01:00

I am not a big fan of the design direction Google has been taking lately.... great products (mostly) but supposedly for the sake of consistency they are ugilifing, and more importantly, making less usable various applications of theirs.

The primary manifestations of their misguided UI direction can be seen in:

Terrible contrast (especially the use of small or thin gray fonts on off-white or light gray backgrounds)
Lots of empty / wasted space (vertical space is at a premium on laptops and tablets, yet they are opting for more scrolling and pushing everything down the screen for no better reason than to make the search bar stand out more)

Google Analytics v5 will soon be the standard interface for all GA users. A lot of the functionality is very welcomed (new user flows, better custom reporting), some is a waste of time / fad (real time reporting is the antithesis of web analytics for most purposes), and some is a step backwards (readability, more use of ~~sampling~~, "fast access mode").

I have made a new userscript that addresses the problems with contrast I have found in GAv5. Please give it a try.

Download the Better Contrast Google Analytics Script directly from userscripts.org

Better Contrast GA Script Homepage

Here is an example comparison showing GA without the script and after applying the script

I was blind but now I can see...

Download the Better Contrast Google Analytics Script directly from userscripts.org

Important Note: Google is updating its UI and CSS fairly regularly (seems about every 1 to 2 weeks they upload a change) and there is the chance that the class names or CSS may change. I will try to keep the replacement CSS loaded by the userscript fairly up to date, but there may be times when it is out of sync. If you find something that breaks the CSS at some point, please post a comment to let me know. Thanks!

Bringcast Podcatcher for Mango V3 feature requests

2012-01-04T13:28:00.000+01:00

I just received my Nokia Lumia 800 from Nokia yesterday thanks to their developer program launchpad. I now have the SDK installed and hope to start tackling my first WP7.5 app soon.

In the meantime, I had to get the phone setup with the microSIM (cutting my old SIM down to size did not work I think because my previous SIM was way way too old and had a different chip pattern). Also, I started loading the phone with apps. WP7 may not have as many apps as iOS or Android, but the list so far is much more impressive then I have seen for Symbian, especially considering how short of a time they have been in the market with this platform. Mango is less then 6 months old and WP7 only launched publicly in Oct 2010.

One of the most glaring faults with the OS is the lack of a podcatcher and the need to sync with Zune on a PC. I download podcasts every day and I do not want to have to turn on my PC to get new podcasts. Nor do I ever listen to podcasts on the PC.

The good news is that I found BringCast for WP7. They apparently released a Mango optimized version in December (v2) and I decided to give it a try. Well, after 30 seconds I went ahead and bought it. From what I have seen and read so far it is the best podcatcher for WP7.

I saw that the developers are considering v3 new features so I wanted to give them a list it consider for v3 (and if not v3.5 or v4):

Automatic updates to check for new podcasts in the subscribed feeds that is configurable (every 2 hours, 4 hours, 6 hours, 12 hours, 24 hours, only manually, etc...)
Automatic download of new episodes with configurable general defaults (none, N, all) and also per feed settings (for example, I want all Slate podcasts, but only the newest episode from WTF?, 2 newest from Fresh Air, and none automatically downloaded from the Economist)
Perhaps automatic deletion of old podcasts (x days after 100% completed). I do not like how from the playlist you can delete it but you cannot delete the actual media. You need to go 1 by 1 in BringCast to delete the media
Live Tile integration:

# of new episodes
Now playing
Status (updating, downloading, etc...)

If possible, full podcast integration with Zune player on the device, not just via playlists. For example, from Zune, I cannot delete the downloaded podcast episode, I can only remove it from the playlist. To delete it I need to go back into BringCast to delete media.

While not feature requests, I also found two things that seem like possible bugs:

While trying to do background downloading of podcasts, I received an error saying that the OS policy does not allow non-WiFi downloading of podcasts. However, in my settings I have the checkbox set to allow 3g downloads.
I tried importing an opml file from a public dropbox url and the app just did a refresh of the screen but did not import anything.

So I hope clarkezonesoftware.com will take my requests into consideration.

For any WP7 owner who needs a podcatcher app, check out BringCast.

Fixing the bad Google Reader redesign with a userscript

2011-11-03T14:29:00.000+01:00

Updated 16-01-2012: list view preview improvements were added in early December and added fixes in mid January for sometimes improper loading of additional posts due to Google script bug

Updated 08-11-2011: Fixed a regression that was not properly calculating the iframe height for previews. FIXED. thank you to @addadi for pointing this out

New TODO:

~~Add preview to list view~~
~~Add style a couple of style improvements to list view~~

PS: If you like the script please share it with others.

Download the google reader script directly from userscripts.org

Updated 07-11-2011: Now you can toggle open or closed the nav sidebar pressing Shift+W. Hope to add a little icon in the next version. thank you to @magorrias for the suggestion

Updated 04-11-2011: I have made the following improvements to the script since yesterday:

Better layout for search area and fixed search problems (it was a z-index problem)
Reduced whitespace in the nav bar and slightly smaller fonts
Preview Function - Now you can see the full post inside gReader (similar functionality to Google preview enhanced which broke with the gReader redesign). It works by clicking the preview link as well as using the keystroke SHIFT+V. It also manages the number of IFRAMES created to keep memory usage reasonable.

Download the updated google reader script

This will be a short post. I may write something later commenting on the bad design choices I see Google making. I have a hard time believing that they have solid data supporting these changes to the UI of various sites, especially Google Reader. As a daily user this change has been a step backwards in a big way in the name of "unity".

OK, for those who are interested I have made a Greasemonkey, Scriptish, Chrome userscript that vastly improves a lot of the problems with the latest redesign of Google Reader

Greatly shortened the height of the fixed header area....removing the logo, collapsing the search with the other feed/nav buttons
Made the subscribe button a normal color since it is something not used very often and should not scream read by default
Tightened up the nav area to make better use of the vertical space
Added a border separating the nav area from the post/feed area
Added a top and bottom border to better identify the currently active post

Here are the links. Works with scriptish, greasemonkey on firefox as well as Google Chrome.

Download the google reader script directly from userscripts.org

Pimp My gReader Script Homepage

This is Google Reader after using the script....making a bit of lemonade from a lemon of a redesign

This is gReader using the Preview functionality

To Do for the Future:

~~The search is not working completely well with this script. I will need to make some adjustments~~
If no one else does it soon, to fix the script that allows for full post previews in Google Reader that broke with the redesign. It was part of BetterGReader and I hope someone will fix that soon. Otherwise, I'll add it to this script.
~~Add a feature to collaspe / expand the side nav bar - Shift + W~~

Google Analytics Premium - Finally what I have been looking for

2011-09-30T14:07:00.000+02:00

I am very excited about GA Premium announced yesterday. I am hopeful that the pricing is reasonable because it seems like a great leap forward for businesses who find GA today a bit too limited in speed, functionality, and especially "fast-access-mode friendly".

Also I am very curious as to when it will be available outside of the US, Canada & UK. Perhaps we could just signup via the UK and then use it for all of our other sites...?

Great intro commercial for the new service. The only thing is that it seems perhaps a bit too inspired from a 2009 video from Grasshopper communications. There sure seems a be a recent wave of videos/motion graphics pieces that all come from a common ancestor. Mannatecheurope soon after Grasshopper seemed to have done a complete ripoff of Grasshopper the same year it came out. I wonder who was the first to do this type of piece. I think the first video that I can remember with some of this same style-DNA or at least something that could be an ancestor were the end credits from An Inconvenient Truth.

Look at the similarities between these 3 videos and you'll see what I mean. You even get a nice audio effect if you start the first two videos at the same time (or start video 2, let it run 10 seconds and then start video 1). They complement each other quite well.

If you know of any other similar videos with the same DNA, include them in the comments.

Updated Script: Yahoo! Mail Ad Removal plus Better Layout

2011-08-23T18:14:00.000+02:00

As with most user scripts they break from time to time when webmasters introduce changes to their sites. In this case, Yahoo! looks like it implemented some new standardized CSS strategy into its Mail app. In the process the userscript code broke because it was looking for old IDs that no longer exist. The script has been updated to work with the new CSS for Yahoo Mail and works well both in Firefox and Chrome. Please download it again if it has stopped working for you. Original post about the script

Available for Firefox* & Google Chrome
Download the user script directly or from the Userscripts.org script page>

Slate Culturefest Dry T-Shirt Entry

2011-08-11T18:57:00.001+02:00

I had hoped they were going to include my entry in the Slate Culture Gabfest T-Shirt contest. I guess I'll just stick to business, SEO, analytics, and coding....leave the "art" to others...

If you like this one.... you can at least put me in as a write-in candidate.

Modern motivation philosophy: more companies need to understand this

2011-08-10T11:28:00.000+02:00

Today, not enough companies (or more broadly organizations) understand yet the need to adapt the way that they approach talent and intellectual resources. Although so much of our work has moved from the factory to the office, so many firms still maintain an outlook on management and labor relations that reflects the characteristics and aspects of an industrial age, low to semi skilled economy.

Perhaps it was the way I was brought up, the friends that I have been fortunate to have during my life as well as the mentors that have helped me, I have always known inside that the traditional mindset to managing organizations does not fit with the informational economy we live in today and have been moving towards since the explosion in IT and personal computing.

Two years ago, I read Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell, and it struck a nerve because it was one of the first times that I came across something very digestible that focused on the importance of meaningful work. I recommend the book (as well as his other writings) quite often because it is so relevant to everyone, from parents to leaders. We all want some sort of success, however you want to define it, for someone. Understanding the points he makes in that book can give people a clearer sense on how to achieve success (again, however it is defined).

Now I had the fortunate chance to come across this talk about motivating teams. This encapsulates in a short and entertaining way, so much of what I believe is necessary for successful organizations today and tomorrow.

Is this a Reader, Feedburner, or Blogger Error? Webmaster Central really wants to be a photo blog

2011-06-03T10:52:00.000+02:00

The search engines just announced Schema.org to standardize the way the webmasters can enrich their content with structured metadata. I was looking foward to read all about it on the Google Webmaster Central Blog. So, naturally, I logged into Google Reader to look for a post.

The first thing that seemed weird was that all of a sudden the blog had 20+ new items.

That never happens. GWC is a blog that normally posts a 1-2 times per week, not much more than that. After clicking on the feed, I was presented with a large photo of some woman. I thought is this a joke? Anyway, I kept navigating through the posts and they were all large, well taken photos.

Here is an example: (Notice that I am in the GWC Blog and the url is poinging to the atom feed for GWC.)

Clicking on the feed details, you can see that something is amiss:

As you can see, something went terribly wrong here. It turns out that the feed seems come from a photgrapher named Joe Hewes. Looking at his blog, you can see that he uses Blogger as his platform.

My guess is that this was not a hack but a bug/error in Blogger. The actual GWC blog website has only its original (non photog) content. If it were a hack, GWC would likely have had its content changed as well.

Well, hopefully Joe likes getting a bit more exposure of his work to the tech community. As for Google, I hope this is not a sign of more problems with quality to come.

Want iGoogle made for laptop / netbook screens? Use PimpMyiGoogle

2011-05-30T10:37:00.000+02:00

Download updated PimpMyiGoogle (May 2011):
Install Pimp My iGoogle – Userscripts.org

View Pimp My iGoogle – Userscripts.org

Writing userscripts for most sites feels a bit like a game of cat and mouse. Everytime Yahoo! or Google or anyone else who has a site that I write scripts for changes their page the following occurs:

My existing scripts partially or completely break
I go to work on writing an update
I get most of the way there and hit a roadblock
I need to relearn a bit of the differences between script behavior en Firefox and Chrome
Updated script is fixed and posted to userscripts
Make a new post on spanishgringo.blogspot.com

I am pretty much at step 6 again. This time it was PimpMyiGoogle.

Google looks to have completely rewritten its content layout and changed its backend JS functions. I noticed that on 1 computer in Chrome a few weeks back that the script no longer worked. However, it kept working fine in Firefox and on my computer at work. I figured that they might be running a new test. Well, fast forward to last week and all browsers on all of my computers stopped respecting most of the improvements made by the userscript.

So, this weekend, I dove in and made the fixes. Basically, the script had to be rewritten from scratch. I decided to clean up a bit and change the old "show sidebar" button to a new CSS3 button.

ToDo for the script:

Get min/max buttons to work in Chome (odd Object does not have click method error although the JS inspector shows that their is a valid click event listener).
Check the module status (expanded/minimized ) to determine which button icon to show.

Any other suggestions for the script? Please let me know. One idea I want to play with is pulling gTalk out of the sidebar and make it a floating menu.

Google Adwords Does not Like Firefox Aurora (5)

2011-05-26T16:02:00.000+02:00

It seems to me that every day Google is taking one further step towards going completely hostile towards Mozilla and Firefox. Either that or they are indifferent to them.

Logging into AdWords today with the latest Firefox Aurora browser (Firefox equivilant to Google Chrome Canary - near-nightly updates, some risk of instability) this is what I saw.

When did a release from 2 days ago become defined as "old"?

I got the alert message up top, which has become quite common when entering many sites with Internet Explorer 6, thanks to the campaign to kill IE6. They must be doing some poor UA sniffing and they have not updated their code to reflect the fact that Mozilla copied Google's own release schedule for their browsers. Being the fans of web standards that they are, Google should be using feature detection anyway.

I hope this is just an oversite. Hopefully it is not in conflict with "don't be evil". You would hope that the AdWords developers would be trying the apps in all types of browsers in advance and only once they have been released.

As recently as 2008, Google was the source of 91-94% of the Mozilla Foundation's (non-profit behind firefox) funding.

When Google decided to launch Chrome instead of further bolstering Firefox, that was the biggest sign that the partnership was going in the wrong direction. Then, when Eric Schmidt had his privacy gaffe, the Mozilla camp used the dreaded M and B words in suggesting a move away from Google. I don't know if a partnership with Google can heal, once that has happened.

This is heading towards a sad end for what was a beautiful partnership responsible for forcing the advancement of web browser technology and web standards. We should leave all of our browsers at half-scroll when the deal finally dies likely later this year.

At least Google does not have a long history of partnerhips turning sour

Angry Birds Web App using Firefox 5

2011-05-12T13:17:00.000+02:00

Yesterday Google announced that it has launched Angry Birds as a web app in collaboration with Rovio and it is available in the Chrome App Store.

Now that I have been using Firefox Aurora a bit more than Chrome Canary these days, I wanted to give it a shot since a web app should work in both HTML 5 enabled (mostly) browsers. Unfortunately, the Chrome store said that my browser does not support this web app and that I should use chrome instead. Well, I installed the app in Chrome to see that it basically is just an app bookmark that points to a specific website chrome.angrybirds.com.

Once I saw the URL, I decided to give it a cut and paste try in Aurora (currently Firefox 5). The rest was bird flying, pig crushing history...

Google Analytics Fast-Access Mode = FAIL-Access Mode

2011-05-09T14:13:00.000+02:00

GA is a great service. Google gives away this great service that other companies charge thousands of dollars. Besides that they have a wonderful API that you can use to write useful data applications. My main complaint over the years, has been the use of Sampling. In general, it may be good enough when looking at high level visitor data, but my experience is that sampling dramatically distorts calculations related to goals, e-commerce data, as well as data related to traffic sources which send relatively small amounts of visitors.

Recently, GA has introduced some new changes to its use of sampling. It appears that they have started using it in more cases. Reports that would never trigger sampling with the amount of visits involved are now using "~~fail~~ fast-access" mode. That is Google's euphemism for "this report was based on sampled data and may be totally wrong". Plus it looks like there may be a bug in the sampling method.

Take a look at this report using normal data for a site I monitor:

Normal graphic (you can see Easter's impact) of Google (Paid/Organic) coming to a site

Everthing above looks fine showing a fairly typical traffic pattern, with the exception of Easter week and an extra holiday in Great Britain (It must have been special hat day in the UK) .

Where did the traffic go?

Now look at the next two images which are the same report as above but with advanced segments applied:

Non-Paid Search Traffic: This should show the Google organic traffic the site received.

Non Paid Search Traffic....I didn't think that I only bought PPC???

Paid Search Traffic: This should show the Google PPC traffic the site received.

Data Dave is sad and confused. If Google the search engine is sending me this traffic, what is it if not PPC or Non-Paid

What happened here?

OK, wait. What if I just looked at the same report showing all three segments at the same time. Perhaps, it will start to make sense (or not):

Nope. If anything, the results look even weirder and more distorted than when looking at the data individually. There sure seems to be a big time bug in the sampling trigging and calculation system of GA.

In conclusion:

With no segments applied, the site data looks normal....however:
With segments applied, 1 month of relatively little data triggered sampling ("fast-access"). This never used to happen for relatvively little traffic in GA.
In both cases of sampling, Google sent the site 0 visits during the month of April.
Where GA showed visits, it was very incorrect (multiple stand.devs apart from the actual observed data)

With sampling applied, in the first week of May, GA reports that Google PPC sent more way traffic than all of Google combined.
Non-Paid alone surpassed All Visits traffic for a coupld of days as well.

Data integrity is the foundation for any analytics / decision support tool. We cannot improve our websites if we cannot rely and believe the data upon which we will be basing our decisions. Luckily, I am not alone in seeing this latest turn for the worse with GA and sampling.

Hopefully, they will fix it soon.

Updated App engine project GA Evolution

2011-05-06T18:48:00.000+02:00

Despite the lack of posts.... this blog has not been forgotten. Just wicked busy at work and home for the last few months.

I have updated gaevolution.appspot.com with a few improvements:

Fixed bug in Weekly reporting that caused weird placment of data when the weeks in included the middle-end of Februrary (parseInt bug in most browsers was to blame)
Updated jQuery to 1.6, Flot to 0.7 and fancyBox to 1.3.4 - it really flies now
Using the latest SDK for appengine

Next up I will need to change how the app handles sampling. The CI value has been ~~marked for death~~ deprecated by Google, so I'll switch to another parameter they have that indicates if sampling was triggered in the report or not.

Any requests out there? Please let me know through the feedback form or as a comment here on the blog.

Soon, I hope to write a post too about how I won my Nokia E7 in February while in London.

Black Friday Kodak Bait & Switch.... Its Scent Stinks!

2010-11-26T11:48:00.001+01:00

Black Friday. Living in Spain, I don't get to take advantage of much of the shopping opportunities available the day after Thanksgiving. Cyber Monday is a bit better, but usually intl shipping pretty much makes the offer often times not worth it. Perhaps if someone I know is coming to Spain soon, I'll order something to be shipped to them and they'll just do me the favor of bringing it over during the next visit.

There is one category though, that is quite useful and applicable for buying online from Spain - photo gifts for family still in the USA. Over the last few years, my mom has been invaded by so many photo mugs, puzzles, calendars from all of her kids (mostly with pictures of grandkids) that you think it would be time to move on to something else. Well, no... She loves every single one of them!

So today I received a Kodak promotional e-mail about their Black Friday sale. It is up to 65% off! I was excited to see the e-mail and the offer so I clicked to shop. It was so easy too since the whole e-mail was pretty much one giant link.

Whohoo! Promised savings! Great!

The problem I have is that the landing page does not really reflect the value of the promotion.

The savings are inversely related to the volume given in the promo for the sale. The sale promo screams 65% and all they have on sale at that rate is 1 product. Most other things are 25% off or buy 1 get 1 free,etc... To me this landing page stinks because it lacks scent (OK, that is a contradiction I know, but it makes sense if you read Brian Eisenberg's artcle on scent). You would think that they central banner would be clicable since in the e-mail it is the same graphic and it is clicable. Why not take me to another sale page with all of the items on sale? Bad design and on Black Friday they should not be using a Bait and Switch on a previous customer.

They also know from my purchase history that I normally buy photo mugs from them. Why not include a photo mug promo for me?

Oh well, let's see what Snapfish has on sale...

Better Y! Mail Beta - Less ads, More mail (Oct-2010)

2010-10-28T16:43:00.000+02:00

Yahoo! just released a new beta of their Mail web application. Overall, it looks a bit more modern and promises much faster performance (I have not seen any improvement yet...in fact sometimes it is slower than before).

However, it needed a bit of spit and polish. I decided to write a user script (works on chrome and firefox with greasemonkey or scriptish) that tightens up the wasted space in the header and removes the main ads that take up space on the mail home page as well as in the inbox.

Available for Firefox* & Google Chrome
Download the user script directly or from the Userscripts.org script page

* Firefox (You need Greasemonkey or Scriptish already installed)

Yahoo Mail Beta Oct 2010 Homepage Before:

Yahoo Mail Beta Oct 2010 Homepage After:

Yahoo Mail Beta Oct 2010 Inbox Before:

Yahoo Mail Beta Oct 2010 Homepage After:

More mail for YOU

Available for Firefox* & Google Chrome
Download the user script directly or from the Userscripts.org script page

* Firefox (You need Greasemonkey or Scriptish already installed)

Updated GA Evolution - Now with Weekly Data, Goals, Optional Metrics

2010-09-27T18:09:00.000+02:00

Over the last few weeks, I have made some improvements to GA Evolution. The functional changes were pushed last Friday and this morning I added a quick YouTube Video to the login page to better help show users what the app is all about.

Here are the highlights of the changes:

Improved performance and session handling (faster is better with less errors)
I have included Goal Data which can be reported as either Goal Completions or Goal Conversion Rates
The metrics columns are now optional so users can build the report that they really want
Report data can now be broken out by week besides by month

As always, enjoy and please pass along feedback on the app.

Link to original GA Evolution post

Link to GAEvolution web app