I had to share this commercial from the American firm Kmart.  Getting across the service proposition can be the hardest part for a business.  How do you make it memorable?  How do you make clear your point of difference?  Or even just tell them you offer a service.  Kmart launched the “Ship My Pants” Video 2 weeks ago on You Tube and on American Tv.  In those two weeks it has had over 15 million views.

Kmart’s Video explains a simple concept – “Can’t find it in store, ask a sales assistant and we’ll post it to you with free delivery” The order in store service is perhaps common in the UK, but not many customers would necessarily realise or ask for it.

Kmart succeed with the catchy phrase “Ship my Pants”, slightly risky and it has provoked a few complaints in the comments, but I have never seen a “Delivery / Service” message go so viral before!

Post from: The Barsley Brief

Kmart – Delivery Video goes Viral

Perfecting On-Page Optimization for Ecommerce Websites | SEOmoz http://www.seomoz.org/blog/perfecting-onpage-optimization-for-ecommerce-websites

A detailed post from SEOMOZ listing 15 areas of a page that can be optimisied for SEO.

10 htaccess Hacks Every SEO Should Know http://bit.ly/IlcR74 nice bit of technical SEO to learn and reference

A bit technical but a set of htaccess rules.

C&A Brazil puts Facebook likes on store hangers to push Mother’s Day collection http://wp.me/p1mP6n-Ha

(The video has English Subtitles if you switch them on) – I thought this was a really innovative cross channel way of shopping.  Hangers on some products in C&A Brazil have like buttons on them.  (Surely a little too similar to the facebook like button).  Instore customers can click the like on the hangers, and this helps customers online know what’s hot.

Of course this wouldn’t substitute a good product description or reviews which go into detail about a product, but it’s something different which could get customers talking.

How To Survive Google’s Unnatural Links Warnings & Avoid Over-optimisation – YouMoz | SEOmoz http://www.seomoz.org/ugc/how-to-survive-googles-unnatural-links-warnings-avoid-overoptimisation

Another SEOMoz post, this time on surviving googles link warnings and not overoptimising your site.

Dilbert has Google Glasses: http://www.dilbert.com/strips/comic/2012-05-01/

Google announced their Google Glasses a couple of weeks ago and now even Dilbert is wearing them.

Sharing: 4 tips for technical SEO – http://bit.ly/JOEtnK

Always good to check your technical SEO as often this is the area that you can make a change to the code that affects all pages on your site.

Inside Search: Search quality highlights: 53 changes for April http://insidesearch.blogspot.com/2012/05/search-quality-highlights-53-changes.html?spref=tw

Google have announced 53 search changes for April, this ranges from adding Formula One rankings into results (try Searching Sebastian Vettel) to more serious algorithm related updates.  Here are some that stood out for me.

More domain diversity. [launch codename "Horde", project codename "Domain Crowding"] Sometimes search returns too many results from the same domain. This change helps surface content from a more diverse set of domains.  This could be an interesting change, often in search results, particularly branded ones, the same domain can take as many as the top 5 results.  Now if they are that brand is this a good thing or bad thing?  But could be good to give more choice.

More text from the beginning of the page in snippets. [launch codename "solar", project codename "Snippets"] This change makes it more likely we’ll show text from the beginning of a page in snippets when that text is particularly relevant.  I think I have noticed this myself recently, google seems to be favouring the on page text to show in the snippet rather than the meta description

Better query interpretation. This launch helps us better interpret the likely intention of your search query as suggested by your last few searches.  This is interesting just to highlight the fact that searches are personalised, two people searching for the same thing could see different results based on their previous searches.

Keyword stuffing classifier improvement. [project codename "Spam"] We have classifiers designed to detect when a website is keyword stuffing. This change made the keyword stuffing classifier better.  You’ve heard it before, but provide rich content, google is tracking down on any sort of poor content or keyword stuffing.

Post from: The Barsley Brief

53 April updates to Google and more

This is a round up of the main stories of the week as they happened from my tweets @charlesbarsley

23rd April

Faking A Breadcrumb Trail To Stand Out On Google http://searchengineland.com/faking-a-breadcrumb-trail-to-stand-out-on-google-119277

Starting the week with an interesting article from searchengineland about breadcrumbs.  Breadcrumbs are not only used on your site to help navigate users but google can also pick up breadcrumbs and use them in place of the url in search results.  This post gives an example of a site which has inserted “5 Star Rated” into the breadcrumbs which gives the impression that Google is rating this result!  This is clearly an abuse of Rich Snippets and google has released a rich snippets spam reporting tool for this purpose.  But who decides where the line is?  I am sure we will see other creative uses of Rich Snippets.

How Does Google Search, Today’s Google Webmasters video – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KyCYyoGusqs

Every few days Google posts a new Webmasters video, this one embedded above was a great video which basically answered the question how does google search work.  A must watch for anyone who asks you “how do we get to number 1!”

Currys, PC World & Dixons websites down all day… Due to Roadworks!!! Unbelivable. http://bit.ly/JARfEv

A few times a year there is a story of a big name website going down, this time it was the turn of the Curry’s group.  I’ve read 3 different stories of this, and each has a different reason as to why they went down.  From DDOS attacks, too much traffic, to a digger going through the fibre optic cable which serves their data centre.  Whatever the case it is a reminder of the need to have a disaster recovery plan.

24th April

Introducing Google Drive… yes, really http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2012/04/introducing-google-drive-yes-really.html

On Tuesday Google Drive was officially released, those of us who already use Google Docs will see it upgraded to a drive next time you sign in and there is downloadable software for for phones, PC’s etc.

Google Drive is basically Dropbox, but with 5 gigs of free data space.  This type of service is phenomonally useful, to have a drive / briefcase of files which you can access anywhere.  I’m not sure at the moment if I can see myself moving off of dropbox though, I have it set up how I want and am happy with it, though if you are Dropbox, you have to worry when Google copies your service!

Google just pushed an algorithmic ranking change: http://goo.gl/At3SB Coverage at Search Engine Land: http://goo.gl/TISZ1

Also today Google announced on their webmasters blog the official details of Google Penguin.  In this post Google stated the benefits of SEO and that it is useful to help search engines identify and read content.  It went on to clarify what types of SEO are not acceptable and there are no suprises here.  Google wants to see high quality rich content.

25th April RT @Hobo_Web Webmaster Tools spring cleaning http://bit.ly/IdHYUm

Google have been busy, aswell as Google Penguin and Google Drive they announced this week a update to webmaster tools.  Google have removed several rarely used or antiquated features.

Yahoo’s genius content strategy – The Oatmeal http://theoatmeal.com/pl/state_web_spring/yahoo via @Oatmeal

And now a little light relief, my cousin shared this on Facebook and I just had to repost.  This is EXACTLY how I use facebook.  I refuse to share every little thing I read or do, so as soon as a request to sign up to an app appears I just google it!!!

If you’re moving your content from an old website to a new website, this post has lots of good info: http://goo.gl/p8z7z

Another hugely  useful post on the Google Webmasters blog.  How to move your website to a different domain.  Ever considered moving from a .co.uk to a .com or can finally afford the domain name you really wanted?  Google tells you how to manage the move process.

Digg loses 35% of their SEO visiblity with latest Google update http://blog.searchmetrics.com/us/2012/04/25/google-bad-seo-update-a-first-earthquake-on-the-short-head/

Searchmetrics post details some early analysis of the winners and losers of the Google Penguin update.  I don’t think there are any real suprises but Digg makes a big headline, but at the end of the day they are just a content aggregator, I go to digg to discover content, I don’t expect to google something specific and be sent to digg to send me on somewhere else!

26th April

How to Teach Yourself SEO http://www.peterattia.com/how-to-teach-yourself-seo/ via @PeterAttia

A nice post introduction for Newbie SEO’s and even some more experienced ones may find the resources listed useful.

Link Building Resources – A Curated List http://pointblankseo.com/link-building-resources via @pointblankseo

Another list!  A useful go to guide with a list of link building resources.

27th April

Ask the experts: How will rel=author affect SEO? http://econsultancy.com/blog/9704-ask-the-experts-how-will-rel-author-affect-seo

Econsultancy asks the experts how rel=author will affect SEO.  There are several different views.  In my opinion initially it will increase CTR (Click Thru Rate) as in some sectors few people are using Rel=Author so this makes your content stand out from the rest of the results.

Longer Term I wouldn’t be surprised to see it have some affect on rankings

Type Zerg Rush into Google – My top score 51 #fridayfun.

How many working hours were lost in the world on Friday because Google added an Easter Egg game?  Type Zerg Rush into google and you have to prevent the google page being destroyed by the invaders, but be careful, they attack from all direction!  What’s your offices top score, mine was a measly 58!

Social Sneakers: Twitter, Facebook, Google+, YouTube & More http://www.seroundtable.com/photos/social-shoes-15066.html

Thats all for this week, please leave a comment with your views and opinions on any of the stories above or anything I’ve missed!

Post from: The Barsley Brief

The Week of April 23rd, Google Penguin, Google Drive & Google everything

Google runs a Youtube channel called GoogleWebmasterHelp where they post useful how to’s and answer webmasters questions.  Today’s video entitled “How Does Google Search Work?” is a great introduction to search engine basics in just 7 minutes 45 seconds.

Matt Cutts talks first of the way in which google crawls websites, how it tracks the keywords on each page, and the secret sauce that ranks them – A combination of Relevancy, Reputation, Page Rank and oh 200 different ranking signals!

And if you really want to study this carefully! Here’s the transcript!

Hi Matt, could you please explain how Google’s ranking and website evaluation process works starting with the crawling and analysis of a site, crawling time lines, frequencies, priorities, indexing and filtering processes within the databases, et cetera?

OK. So that’s basically just like, tell me everything about Google. Right? That’s a really expansive question. It covers a lot of different ground. And in fact, I have given orientation lectures to engineers when they come in. And I can talk for an hour about all those different topics, and even talk for an hour about a very small subset of those topics. So let me talk for a while and see how much of a feel I can give you for how the Google infrastructure works, how it all fits together, how our crawling and indexing and serving pipeline works.

Let’s dive right in. So there’s three things that you really want to do well if you want to be the world’s best search engine. You want to crawl the web comprehensively and deeply. You want to index those pages. And then you want to rank or serve those pages and return the most relevant ones first. Crawling is actually more difficult than you might think. Whenever Google started, whenever I joined back in2000, we didn’t manage to crawl the web for something like three or four months. And we had to have a war room. But a good way to think about the mental model is we basically take page rank as the primary determinant. And the more page rank you have– that is, the more people who link to you and the more reputable those people are– the more likely it is we’re going to discover your page relatively early in the crawl. In fact, you could imagine crawling in strict page rank order, and you’d get the CNNs of the world and The New York Times of the world and really very high page rank sites. And if you think about how things used to be, we used to crawl for 30 days. So we’d crawl for several weeks. And then we would index for about a week. And then we would push that data out. And that would take about a week. And so that was what the Google dance was. Sometimes you’d hit one data center that had old data. And sometimes you’d hit a data center that had new data.

Now there’s various interesting tricks that you can do. For example, after you’ve crawled for 30 days, you can imagine recrawling the high page rank guys so you can see if there’s anything new or important that’s hit on the CNN home page. But for the most part, this is not fantastic. Right? Because if you’re trying to crawl the web and it takes you 30 days, you’re going to be out-of-date. So eventually, in 2003, I believe, we switched as part of an update called Update Fritz to crawling a fairly interesting significant chunk of the web every day. And so if you imagine breaking the web into a certain number of segments, you could imagine crawling that part of the web and refreshing it every night. And so at any given point, your main base index would only be so out of date. Because then you’d loop back around and you’d refresh that. And that works very, very well. Instead of waiting for everything to finish, you’re incrementally updating your index. And we’ve gotten even better over time. So at this point, we can get very, very fresh. Any time we see updates, we can usually find them very quickly. And in the old days, you would have not just a main or a base index, but you could have what were called supplemental results, or the supplemental index. And that was something that we wouldn’t crawl and refresh quite as often. But it was a lot more documents. And so you could almost imagine having really fresh content, a layer of our main index, and then more documents that are not refreshed quite as often, but there’s a lot more of them. So that’s just a little bit about the crawl and how to crawl comprehensively.

What you do then is you pass things around. And you basically say, OK, I have crawled a large fraction of the web. And within that web you have, for example, one document. And indexing is basically taking things in word order. Well, let’s just work through an example. Suppose you say Katy Perry. In a document, Katy Perry appears right next to each other. But what you want in an index is which documents does the word Katy appear in, and which documents does the word Perry appear in? So you might say Katy appears in documents 1, and 2, and 89,and 555, and 789.And Perry might appear in documents number 2, and 8, and73, and 555, and 1,000.And so the whole process of doing the index is reversing ,so that instead of having the documents in word order, you have the words, and they have it in document order. So it’s, OK, these are all the documents that a word appears in. Now when someone comes to Google and they type in Katy Perry, you want to say, OK, what documents might match Katy Perry? Well, document one has Katy, but it doesn’t have Perry. So it’s out. Document number two has both Katy and Perry, so that’s a possibility. Document eight has Perry but not Katy.89 and 73 are out because they don’t have the right combination of words.555 has both Katy and Perry. And then these two are also out. And so when someone comes to Google and they type in Chicken Little, Britney Spears, Matt Cutts, Katy Perry, whatever it is, we find the documents that we believe have those words, either on the page or maybe in backlinks, in anchor text pointing to that document.

Once you’ve done what’s called document selection, you try to figure out, how should you rank those? And that’s really tricky. We use page rank as well as over 200 other factors in our rankings to try to say, OK, maybe this document is really authoritative. It has a lot of reputation because it has a lot of page rank. But it only has the word Perry once. And it just happens to have the word Katy somewhere else on the page. Whereas here is a document that has the word Katy and Perry right next to each other, so there’s proximity. And it’s got a lot of reputation. It’s got a lot of links pointing to it. So we try to balance that off. You want to find reputable documents that are also about what the user typed in. And that’s kind of the secret sauce, trying to figure out a way to combine those 200 different ranking signals in order to find the most relevant document.

So at any given time, hundreds of millions of times a day, someone comes to Google .We try to find the closest data center to them .They type in something like Katy Perry. We send that query out to hundreds of different machines all at once, which look through their little tiny fraction of the web that we’ve indexed. And we find, OK, these are the documents that we think best match. All those machines return their matches. And we say, OK, what’s the creme de la creme? What’s the needle in the haystack? What’s the best page that matches this query across our entire index? And then we take that page and we try to show it with a useful snippet. So you show the key words in the context of the document. And you get it all back in under half a second.

So that’s probably about as long as we can go on without straining YouTube. But that just gives you a little bit of a feel about how the crawling system works, how we index documents, how things get returned in under half a second through that massive parallelisation. I hope that helps. And if you want to know more, there’s a whole bunch of articles and academic papers about Google, and page rank, and how Google works. But you can also apply to–there’s jobs@google.com, I think, or google.com/jobs, if you’re interested in learning a lot more about how search engines work. OK. Thanks very much.

Post from: The Barsley Brief

How Does Google Search Work? Matt Cutts Explains

16th April, The New Google Link Algorithm http://www.branded3.com/seo/the-new-google-link-algorithm/ via @Branded_3

Branded3 wrote this post highlighting the changes to Googles algorithm, specifically that google are now targeting tactics some sites use rather than specific types of sites.  The post specifically details the “google unnatural link notices”, what happens if you get one, and touches on what you should do.

Updates to rich snippets: http://goo.gl/wPoN5

Later that day an official post on the Google Webmasters Blog, not about unnatural links, but about Rich Snippets.  I’m really excited about the future possibilities for Rich Snippets and looking forward to the opportunity to experiment.  Google have extended their use of Rich Snippets, rolling out Product snippets globally, previously this was limited to just a limited set of locales.  Also Google have improved their Rich Snippets testing tool, previously to test snippets you needed to enter a URL, now you can paste in raw HTML code, so you can test before you put code live.

18th April RT @Hobo_Web: Is Your Website Sinking Like The Titanic in Google? http://hobo.im/HM2Woh

Across Tuesday & Wednesday webmasters noticed significant changes in rankings of many sites including some previously page one sites being delisted.  Many assumed this was the result of unnatural link warnings, and google was now updating the algorithm to take link building practices into account.

Hobo wrote this great common sense article detailing the difference between good and bad techniques and what you could do if you feel you have been affected.

19th April WOW! Google deindexed a ton of sites, sending people into a frenzy over algo changes. Turns out, it was all an accident http://bit.ly/I74e0c

An a day later we wake up and discover it was all a dream… well not quite, though Matt Cutts posted on his Google +

So is everything back to normal?  Some Webmasters have reported they have now bounced back.  But others don’t believe the parked domains was the only thing google changed and still are experiencing unusual rankings.  This whole situation has also sparked a debate of whether Negative SEO works.  Rather than using good practices to boost your site, if you used spammy link building methods on competitors sites would they drop in the rankings.  The jury is still out, but one things certain, I wouldn’t like to be google!  If they punish sites who use unnatural link building practices then they are encouraging Black Hat SEO, but if they don’t punish these sites they could still have poor sites high in the rankings.  Is there a compromise they could reach and just ignore negative links.

20th April Key Takeaways from IonSearch 2012 | Search Laboratory Blog http://www.searchlaboratory.com/blog/2012/04/key-takeaways-from-ionsearch-2012/ via @searchlabs

A nice read to finish the week, a write up from Search Laboratory of the inaugural IonSearch Marketing Conference.  With the whole conference condensed into a set of key takeaway bullet points.  Everyone will take something away from this.

Post from: The Barsley Brief

The week of 16th April, Unnatural links, Rich Snippets & More

The theory was this was a new Google “Over Optimisation Penalty” or a Google Unnatural link penalty, as recently Matt Cutts (Google’s Head of Webspam)  commented that Google would be looking at sites which had overoptimised and Webmasters have been receiving messages (through the Webmasters Tools) regarding unnatural links that google has detected.

Later in the week though Matt Cutts clarified https://twitter.com/#!/mattcutts/status/192746565574721536 that there was an error in their algorithm which was marking some live domains as parked.

So where does that leave us?  Not everyone believes things are back to normal, and indeed many SEO’s are writing that this may have been a test of a google algorithm not a mistake.  Either way it is generally believed that google will start to penalise “Over Optimisation”.  So how do you get your SEO “just right”, not to hot, not to cold but just right.  Well SEOBook.com have published the Goldilocks SEO Infographic.

This infographic looks at different elements of Search Engine Optimisation and details what would be too much, and what wouldn’t be enough.   I think I can summarise this by saying just use your common sense, if it looks spammy or has only an SEO purpose, then expect google to treat it that way!

What are your tips for getting SEO “Just Right”?  Leave a comment

SEO Infographics by SEO Book

Post from: The Barsley Brief

Over Optimisation? Getting SEO “Just Right”

13th June RT @getelastic Do you think Groupon will survive without a customer retention strategy? http://www.getelastic.com/groupon-strategy/ >> NO!

A nice post from Get Elastic commenting on the possible Groupon IPO and the state of their business.  To my mind after the Linkedin IPO, there is such a lack of Internet IPO’s that people are jumping to be part of them regardless of the business.  I have mixed views on Groupon, they have done well to become the biggest brand and be very well known.  However speaking personally if I ever look at their site all it seems to offer is teeth whitening and massages.

Also despite all their success they are not making any money.  I think there is a future in this industry but I don’t think it is Groupon.  Currently I see Facebook Deals and their real time, local approach much more engaging to consumers, and much more mainstream, but time will tell

13th JuneThe first ever Rightmove Hack-a-thon|Rightmove Property Blog http://t.co/VW6i4LK > Congrats to Tom (Uni Friend) and all on the winning team

The property website Rightmove held an internal Hack a thon competition for its developers to propose new features and technologies for their website, and then the top 9 ideas were split between teams to design and build.

Firstly congratulations to the winning team and Tom (in the video) who was a housemate of mine at Surrey University.

Secondly though what a great concept.  I’m sure we’ve all had ideas to push our respective sites forward, be they niche and cool, or far reaching and functional, but there is never time to do everything.  This “Hack-A-Thon” gives everyone throughout the company chance to contribute, share their ideas and feel like they have the opportunity to make a difference to the business.  For the management team it is an invaluable source of ideas for the site from the people who know it best, your staff!  They can tell you what doesn’t work, what’s missing, and how to move it forward.

13th June – notonthehighstreet.com launches group gifting http://t.co/ucJOjFP > interesting concept, is it useful or a bit to complex/long to be used?

Not on the High Street have launched a group gifting system on their website, which is demonstrated in the attached video.  To use it, you decide what to buy, how much each of you want to pay for it, who is paying what, send out the invitations, and once the product has been fully paid it is bought and sent to the recipient with cards.

This is an interesting concept, but I just wonder whether it is trying to solve a problem that doesn’t exist.  Sure its nicer for everyone to pay individually than one person pay and try and claim it back from the others, but by the time you’ve all agreed what you want to do, then set this all up, then all paid for it – wouldn’t it have been less hassle just to do it the old fashioned way!  Also if the gift is for an event and some people are in less of a rush to pay would it still be instock or if one decides not to buy what happens?  – though at the same time, good to see new ideas for payment and innovation.

13th June – RT @getelastic A/B and Multivariate Test Validity: Beware of Bad Data! http://bit.ly/kxbgPW

A good top line post of some tips when A/B testing, I would certainly agree with the first, sample size is key, as you will see all the metrics jumping up and down until you have enough traffic to give you statistical relevance and a high confidence level.

15th June – Net-a-Porter innovates with live feed of customer buys – http://www.internetretailing.net/2011/06/net-a-porter-innovates-with-live-feed-of-customer-buys/

A fun integration of add to bag / wishlist data against IP location on the Net a Porter Website.  This really shows more than anything else what a global playing field eCommerce is with add to bags popping up from all over the world.

15th June – RT @Econsultancy Starbucks’ Facebook page receives 12X more traffic than Starbucks.com #FODM

I just thought that this was a fun stat, I’m sure anyone would be envious of their 23 million fans, but on first glance it doesn’t look like they are doing a whole lot to leverage their Facebook page.  Although they post regularly it is in a very formal company tone of voice and (to me at least) doesn’t feel engaging, also I’m not sure what the purpose is of the facebook page.

15th June – RT @Econsultancy 92:1 marketing’s dirty little statistic http://econsultancy.com/uk/blog/7657-92-1-marketings-dirty-little-statistic-5

I found this post very believable, I can’t count the number of times that I have been followed by advertising, PPC or any form of acquisition marketing, but when I come to click, they either don’t sell it or worse never did!  Just as much effort should go into personalising the site for customers based on the route they entered and ensuring you meet their expectations.

16th June – RT BBCTech Facebook no-nos http://bbc.in/jI7WRR

In the week when a Juror was sentenced for contacting the accused through Facebook the BBC publishes a list of Facebook No No’s with some memorable examples.

16th June – RT DirectorsOfCOM The term ‘Average conversion rate’ is banded around the eCommerce industry so much these days, but are you… http://drct.co/WYn10

Conversion is such a eCommerce buzzword, even people who don’t work directly in eCommerce want to know “Whats the conversion of” – This is very frustrating as there a so many types of conversion metrics, and so places to apply it to – The landing page, the category, the products etc that you can never understand “the average conversion rate”  I believe you should focus on graphing your conversion and tracking its progress, look at the improvements you have made and strive to increase it further rather than worrying about other companies average!

16th June – RT @Econsultancy PR firms need to get hip to the new rules for reviews http://bit.ly/iwWKmn

This week Duke Nukem Forever broke the record for most delayed video game at 14 years and 41 days since its announcement.  Obviously expectations were high however the PR Company responsible for sending out review copies of the game publicly tweeted -

#AlwaysBetOnDuke too many went too far with their reviews…we r reviewing who gets games next time and who doesn’t based on today’s venom

They definitely shouldn’t have said that publicly and as a result have lost the contract, however this just goes to highlight what is probably the unspoken rule of review websites or magazines.  Flicking my thoughts to onsite reviews, I like Amazon’s take on this – They have a Amazon Vine program whereby they give out free review copies of products, the then clearly mark the review as such.  I think this challenges the reviewer in a very positive way to focus on functionality and features rather than just like or dislike.

Post from: The Barsley Brief

Tweets for the week ending 18th June 2011

The blurb from the back cover

• Pay new employees $2000 to quit.
• Make customer service the responsibility of the entire company, not just a department.
• Focus on company culture as the #1 priority.
• Apply research from the science of happiness to running a business.
• Help employees grow both personally and professionally.
• Seek to change the world.
• Oh, and make money too.

Sound crazy? It’s all standard operating procedure at Zappos, the online retailer that’s doing over $1 billion in gross merchandise sales annually. After debuting as the highest-ranking newcomer in Fortune magazine’s annual “Best Companies to Work For” list in 2009, Zappos was acquired by Amazon in a deal valued at over $1.2 billion on the day of closing.

In his first book, Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh shares the different lessons he has learned in business and life, from starting a worm farm to running a pizza business; through LinkExchange (acquired by Microsoft for $265 million), Zappos, and more.

Tony shows how a very different kind of corporate culture is a powerful model for achieving success — and how by concentrating on the happiness of those around you, you can dramatically increase your own.

In the authors words

My Review

The book is part lifestory, part business lessons.  It is split into three sections

1 – Profits – In section 1 Tony Hsieh writes about his early life, his entrepreneurial spirit while young and at college, his first business Linkexchange and the beginnings of Zappos.

2 – Profits and Passion – This section starts as Tony takes a full time position at Zappos.  A time of the Dot Com crash, with funding hard to find survival is the number 1 priority but even in this climate, culture and purpose grow.  This chapter also documents Zappos’ Core Values, and what they mean to Tony Hsieh and those within Zappos.

3 – Profits, Passion and Purpose – Zappos has become a success, and in this section Tony writes about the process to which they were acquired by Amazon, the things he has done since, and the academic frameworks that Zappos actions could be compared to and why everyone is looking for Happiness!

I would recommend this book to anyone with an interest in Service / Satisfaction or who wants to broaden their eCommerce knowledge.  The book is written in a easy to read voice, and is the tale of a real company, so is very ingrossing and not at all like a textbook!  Zappos have seemingly unparalleled openness about the inner workings of the company and even have a website http://www.deliveringhappiness.com/ companion to the book, with further reading, Zappos Core Values, and a how to for your business.

Also I was surprised that Zappos offer tours of their offices http://www.zapposinsights.com/main/experiences/tours/ I can’t imagine most offices wanting to open themselves for tours 12 times a week but it sounds like a fascinating and inspiring experience.

Delivering Happiness isn’t widely available in the UK – But you can usually find a New or Used copy on Amazon here

Post from: The Barsley Brief

Delivering Happiness – Tony Hsieh – Review

6th June – SEO benefits of user reviews http://t.co/ckCZLlJ > With such choice online, reviews are the deciding point for me to purchase so essential!

As I said in the tweet buying any product which I am not familiar with reviews will be the deciding point for me, just last week I bought a set of Car Jumpleads which I know almost nothing about, so it was the reviews which both educated me on what to look for and which to buy.

As to their SEO benefit I think reviews can be a great way on often generic products to differentiate your page content from that of your competitors.  Also the reviews are likely to include a lot of the wording that you may be likely to search for but may not be in the product name.

6th June – ASOS adopts ‘summer hours’ policy for staff http://drct.co/VFSwK #in > interesting, being only Friday probably adds to culture and satisfaction for a minimal loss of output

Ok so I cheated on this one and used Deck.ly to extend over 140 characters.  I enjoyed reading the thoughts of the Directors of Opinion Panel.  I agree that allowing staff to leave early on a Friday is likely to be a big boost to moral, enhances ASOS’s culture, and makes them a place people want to work.

However, at the end of Autumn it will put a bit of a downer on things to have to work till close when they end this Summer scheme.  Also – Surely a web operation is 24-7, particularly in the Social spaces, Friday afternoon could be a key time for them to enagage with shoppers.

8th June – RT mrchrisaddison Google Ads sent me a message telling me they are the most effective form of advertising my website. They sent it by letter. Point defeated.

A humorous post by Comedian Chris Adddison, not a month goes by when I don’t get letters about Google Ads either!

8th June - Why a negative review may not be so bad after all – http://econsultancy.com/uk/blog/7622-why-a-negative-review-may-not-be-negative-at-all

A fairly standard argument here about what one person may dislike in a product or service may be exactly what another loves.  However illustrated well with the YouTube clip of the Alamo Drafthouse cinema chain who firmly stand by their no mobile phone policy! – You Tube clip NSFW

9th June – RT retailweek In case you missed it earlier – 10 lessons to learn from @Asos http://bit.ly/k7wCqF

No let all your staff leave at 3pm isn’t on the list!  A sensible rounded list of some of the areas that ASOS have invested in early and seen dividends, including International, Mobile, Delivery and Engagement.

10th June – RT retailweek 50 websites to watch http://bit.ly/iqSuM9

A great list if you want some inspiration, ideas, and to see what is happening in the industry.  Each of the 50 companies is suggested by a etailer themselves, with a nice snippet of what they’re doing that makes the site number one for them.

10th June - Javari provides the best customer experience: study http://econsultancy.com/uk/blog/7635-javari-provides-the-best-customer-experience-study

As Graham Charlton writes, I too find Javari a bit uninspiring, perhaps its the beige colour scheme, however behind this they make their site incredibly simple to navigate and use and there’s a lot to be learnt from this.

10th June – Examples of Online Changing rooms – http://t.co/jmGr5zk H&M – Impressive that you can swivel the model for a back view

We’re seeing more and more online retailers, trying a changing room approach, This is a link to a Snow Patrol review of a couple, I think they do have a strong purpose in that you can see the length of a garment and the fit, but I’m torn whether a “changing room” approach, which does allow you to mix and match outfits really adds to conversion over a lifestyle shot model image.

10th June – Customer Reviews – Erasing authenticity: When correcting is corrupting http://www.bazaarvoice.com/blog/2011/06/10/erasing-authenticity-when-correcting-is-corrupting/

The last tweet this week is for a Bazaarvoice Blog post, in response to Zappos (another Amazon company) announcing they would correct customer reviews for spelling and grammar, I am with Bazaarvoice that the customers complete review mistakes and all should be shown, otherwise you loose the authenticity and authority of that customers review.  Though I have seen some shockers for spelling and grammar in the past!

Post from: The Barsley Brief

Tweets for the week ending 11th June 2011

This has led to Facebook becoming a much greater marketing arena for brands.  With many of the big brands having their own pages on Facebook, some even sell on facebook.  Some are really clever and look to leverage the power of social recommendations How Benefit Cosmetics gave their customers a voice on Facebook (and won a Shorty Award)

But that’s not what I wanted to write about today.  What I find really interesting is the reverse of this, using the Facebook API to pull data out of facebook and use it on a website.  A obvious example of this is the recent ability to have a Facebook comments function on your site.  As demonstrated here at Mashable http://mashable.com/2011/03/01/facebook-comments-plugin/ The advantage of Facebook comments is that it adds the social dimension to comments, you can quickly find any comments left by your friends, or you can read about who a commenter is easily which could add legitimacy to their post.

But what I find really interesting are the companies who are making their own technologies to utilise Facebook API data

A colleague showed me an example of this on Amazon.com -

By letting Amazon connect to my facebook account it can pull in all my friends information from their facebook profiles, Amazon then sorts this to give a page of Book, Movie and Music recommendations based upon all your friends, it also allows you to click on any individual and receive recommendations for them based upon their Facebook profile data

This gave me two lines of thoughts,

1 – There are endless possibilities

2 – If any of my friends are able to share my data is my data safe?

The Endless Possibilities

What Amazon is doing is fairly basic, they are just looking for common words in the facebook interests data to pull together those items as recommendations, then also related items based on their own recommendations algorithm.  I don’t believe that Amazon are able to see email addresses, but with the name and Birth date and location they must be able to make an intelligent guess at who that user is.  Indeed when you select a particular Facebook friend they ask whether you can match up the relevant wish list.

This seems a good compromise for data as finding your friends wish list would give you a good idea of what to buy that friend, whereas (if I’m anything to go by) their facebook interests may not have been updated since they joined facebook!

If any of my Friends are able to share my data is my data safe

It seems scary that at the click of one button I can export the data of 150+ friends out of facebook and off to an external site, now I trust Amazon but anyone can make a facebook app, request this information, and users will just blindly click it.  Trawling through the facebook privacy settings there is an option to set what data your friends can share.  I’ve set it to nothing, but I would rather receive a request to share data with an app as I would like to choose apps where my friends could see me rather than issue a blanket NO!

Summary

Facebook is just one example of a site with a database of users sharing their data with other companies, other examples include Android, Apple, and any social site.  Currently users will just click those annoying pop up screens so they can play a game not realising the data being shared but it will only take a few misuses of that data till people become more careful.

What is the future?  Do we want a personalised experience everywhere we go?  Is giving up our personal data too much for this?

Leave a comment if you have any views, or if you have seen any other examples of a site integrating with Facebook in a innovative way.

Further Reading

Amazon’s Facebook Integration Is The Future Of Commerce

Amazon Now Taps Into Facebook For Social Product Recommendations

Amazon + Facebook = A Perfect Storm of Recommendations

Post from: The Barsley Brief

Our Social Future? Amazon leading the way with Facebook Integration