“Don’t worry,” groaned my friend. “It happens all the time.” He struggled fruitlessly with the controls, then went online to find the instructions on the manufacturer’s Web site. Guilty though I felt at having caused such a kerfuffle, I couldn’t help wondering why he’d bought those fancy digital taps. What’s wrong with the old-fashioned ones that you turn on and off by hand?

My friend had fallen victim to the curse of over-complicated design. He’d believed in the blandishments of a dazzling “innovation” that promised to make his life easier, but was so woefully misconceived that it threatened to make it harder.

You’ve probably been cursed too. Inoperable cellphones. Impenetrable Web sites. Neurotically overstyled objects. Too much packaging. Digital versions of this, that and the other. Things with esoteric functions that we’re unlikely to ever be able to pronounce correctly, let alone to want to use. We’ve all tussled with them from time to time.

There’s nothing new in this. Ever since the Industrial Revolution, designers have striven to make things that offer more than their predecessors. More speed. More power. More functions. More whatever. If the “more” is well chosen and executed, it can lead to progress; but if not, it could have the opposite effect. Who has enough time to go online to find out how to turn off a tap?

(read the full article on nytimes.com)

1. Talk about something other than yourself. Too many corporate marketers make the mistake of creating blogs as purely another mechanism to talk about their products and services. While increased sales and improved brand visibility may be two fundamental goals of a corporate blog, there are more effective ways for achieving those goals that just pushing product.

2. Keep your blog focused. Whatever message you chose to deliver, stick with it. Unfortunately, some corporate blogs lack a clear message and include posts on topics all across the board. Because goals were never defined, these blogs have a difficult time gaining readership.

3. Give your blog a distinct personality. Whether you choose to feature just one blogger or multiple bloggers, let the blogger’s voice come through in the posts. Without a distinct personality, your blog will be just like every other faceless corporate blog.

4. Have some fun. Another effective method for letting a corporate blog stand out from the rest is to infuse some humor and excitement. Granted, this technique may not be appropriate for all corporate brands. But if you’re able to, consider creating a blog that can be light-hearted, relaxed and at-times funny. It’s just another way to humanize and personalize the brand for customers.

5. Provide readers with something they can’t get anywhere else. Use a corporate blog to announce company breaking news or highlight original research in order to make the blog truly unique. Assuming the information is interesting and useful, readers will keep coming back for more. The simply can’t get it anywhere else. Plus, your customers can form a close connection with your brand because they feel as if they’re gaining an inside look or exclusive information.

ROI Reality Check
Oliver Blanchard’s Social Media ROI Presentation is a witty, fun introduction to ROI in terms of social media. If you’re confused about what ROI is (or rather, how it is measured), in the context of social media, check out his presentation before you proceed with this post.

Defining Clear Goals
As a standard formula, ROI is pretty basic, ROI = (X – Y) / Y, where X is your final value and Y is your starting value. In other words, if you invest $5 and get back $20, your ROI is (20 – 5) / 5 = 3 times your initial investment. In the financial sense, ROI is measured purely in the context of dollars and cents, however, the principles can really apply to any type of investment — monetary or not.

Having concrete goals and concrete baselines is crucial to calculating your return on investment. So before you set out to measure and monitor your social media returns, you need to have a clear idea of what it is you want to accomplish.

Once you have your goals defined, you need to gauge the baseline for your levels before starting or changing your social media strategy. For example, if your goal is to increase social media mentions of your company, in order to measure the ROI of any actions taken toward that goal, you need to know where you stand now. You can’t evaluate the ROI accurately without a baseline.

Metrics Tools
Although ROI ≠ metrics, traditional web metrics like traffic counts, number of comments, Twitter followers, Facebook fans, etc. are an important component when calculating your ROI.

The trick is to not rely solely on the numbers, but on what the numbers end up leading to. For instance, does your increase in website visitors correlate with higher sales? Are people that find your website from Twitter or Facebook then clicking on your product pages or going to the e-Commerce section of your site? That’s the sort of data you want to be able to look for.

Making the Data Usable
This is the hard part. After you have defined your baseline, you need to take the metrics from your monitoring tools and see how they correlate to higher sales, better customer retention, or whatever your primary markers for output are.

If your ultimate measurement is sales for instance, look at your sales level. If it has increased, look at the number of referrers on your e-commerce site (assuming you can track this data) from your website or Twitter or the number of coupons used that were given away in a Facebook campaign to start calculating which sales stemmed from your social media campaigns.

Do you see any trends? Is traffic up to your store after posting on Facebook? What about Twitter? Does store traffic correlate with more sales when evaluating that same data? Does a higher sentiment analysis on Twitter lead to more sales or more visits?

Finding trends and tracking them back to their point of origin is the key to measuring ROI.

From the corporate brand (BMW), to the product brand (BMW M3 Coupe) and down to the personal brand (car salesman), branding is a critical component to a customer’s purchasing decision. These days, customer complaints and opinions are online and viewable through a simple search, on either Google (Google) or through social networks. There is no hiding anymore and transparency and authenticity are the only means to survive and thrive in this new digital kingdom.

Many people think that personal branding is just for celebrities such as Paris Hilton or Britney Spears, yet each and every one of us is a brand. Personal branding, by definition, is the process by which we market ourselves to others. As a brand, we can leverage the same strategies that make these celebrities or corporate brands appeal to others. We can build brand equity just like them.

We can also have just as much presence as most startups and mid-size companies and products. Social media tools have leveled the playing ground and have enabled us to reach incredible heights, at the cost of our time. Today, I want to share the personal branding process, so you can start to think about what face you want to show to the world and how you want to position yourself for success!

1. Discover your brand

The single biggest mistake people make is that they either brand themselves just for the sake of doing it or that they fail to invest time in learning about what’s in their best interests. The key to success, and this isn’t revolutionary, is to be compensated based on your passion. In order to find your passion, you need a lot of time to think, some luck and you need to do some research online to figure out what’s out there.

Brand discovery is about figuring out what you want to do for the rest of your life, setting goals, writing down a mission, vision and personal brand statement (what you do and who you serve), as well as creating a development plan. Have you ever been called intelligent or humorous by your peers or coworkers? That description is part of your brand, especially if you feel those attributed pertain to you. To know if you’ve discovered your brand, you need to make this equation equal:

Your self-impression = How people perceive you

Before you enter the next step in the personal branding process, you’ll want to select a niche, whereby you can be the master of your domain. For example, Joel Comm has mastered the Google Adsense niche and brands himself using his name, and Brian Solis owns the social media PR niche with his PR 2.0 blog (under his name). When I say domain, I mean an area where there aren’t many competitors and literally, your online domain name. Once you sort this all out, now it’s time to create your brand.

2. Create your brand

Now that you know what you want to do and have claimed a niche, at least in your mind, it’s time to get it on paper and online. The sum of all the marketing material you should develop for your brand is called a Personal Branding Toolkit. This kit consists of the following elements that you can use to highlight your brand and allow people to easily view what you’re about:

1. Business card: It doesn’t matter if you’re a college student, CEO, or a consultant, everyone should have their own business card. The card should contain your picture, your personal brand statement (such as Boston Financial Expert), as well as your *preferred* contact information and corporate logo if necessary. You can create your own business card and share it through your mobile phone using mydropcard.com or rmbrme.com. On the web, BusinessCard2.com is a great social network for creating and distributing your person business card.
2. Resume / cover letter / references document: These are typical documents that you need for applying for jobs and when you go on interviews (something over 2 million job seekers will be doing as we speak). Be sure to prioritize each document with information custom to the target position. Take your resume online and add social features to it to make the ultimate social media resume, promoting your personal brand to the world and making it shareable.
3. Portfolio: Whether you use a CD, web or print portfolio, it’s a great way to showcase the work you’ve done in the past, which can convince someone of your ability to accomplish the same results for the future. Figdig.com and carbonmade.com are social networks for people who want to show off their creative skills to the world.
4. Blog / website: You need to own yourname.com or a website that aligns with your name in some fashion. Depending on who you are, how much time you have on your hands and if you can accept criticism, you should either start a blog or stick with a static homepage. Those who blog will have a stronger asset than those who don’t because blogs rank higher in search engines and lend more to your expertise and interest areas over time.
5. LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter profile: A LinkedIn (LinkedIn) profile is a combination of a resume, cover letter, references document and a moving and living database of your network. Use it to create your own personal advertising, to search for jobs or meet new people.

   Over 160 million people have profiles, but almost none of them have branded themselves properly using this medium. Be sure to include a Facebook (Facebook) picture of just you, without any obscene gestures or unnecessary vodka bottles. Also, input your work experience and fill out your profile, while turning on the privacy options that disable the ability for people to tag you in pictures and videos (allowing people to see the ones tagged of you).

   Your Twitter (Twitter) profile should have an avatar that is carved out of your Facebook picture and used in your LinkedIn profile. You need to use a distinct background, fill out your profile and include a link to either your blog or LinkedIn profile. Twitterbacks.com, developed by internet mogul Jim Kukral, has templates you can use to sculpt your very own Twitter background (Photoshop skills not included). Twitbacks.com is another solution that also lets you promote your Twitter profile.

6. Video (video) resume: A video resume is a short video of you talking about why you are the best for a specific job opportunity. You get about a minute or so to communicate your brand and are able to send the link, once you upload it to YouTube (YouTube), to hiring managers.
7. Wardrobe: Your personal style is tangible and is extremely important for standing out from the crowd. Select clothing that best represents you because it will be viewable through your pictures/avatars online, as well as when you meet people in reality.
8. Email address: Don’t overlook your email address as not being a significant part of your toolkit. Most people use email over all social networks and when you connect with someone on a social network, you are notified via email, so get used to it. Your email address poses a great opportunity for your brand. I recommend using gmail because of the acceptance of Google and since GTalk (Gtalk) allows you to form tighter relationships with others. For your address, use “firstname.lastname@gmail.com.”

What’s next?

After you spend the time on these parts of your personal branding toolkit, it’s time to showcase it to the world, especially your target audience. Don’t be fooled by the myth that if you build it, they will come. Unless you’re the luckiest person on earth, you’ll have to actually communicate everything you’ve created to others.

In the next post, I will discuss how you can take the personal branding toolkit you’ve developed and communicate it to your audience. I’ll give you tips on how to market your personal brand to become known in your niche. Then, I’ll finish by explaining how you should monitor and update your brand over your lifetime.

Even though the last two seems to pick up some ground, the push will be a lot more effective if it's on the user browser.

(image courtesy of readwriteweb)

I think design covers so much more than the aesthetic. Design is fundamentally more. Design is usability. It is Information Architecture. It is Accessibility. This is all design.

- Mark Boulton

1. Speed, speed, speed

In the recent interview with google's own Matt Cutts, he says "A lot of people within Google think that the web should be fast, it should be a good experience; and so it’s sort of fair to say if you’re a fast site, maybe you should get a little bit of a bonus. Or maybe if you have a really awfully slow site, users don’t want that as much." And the controversy goes on and on...

In my opinion, a website does not need to be fast but it needs to be responsive. This does not translate to websites with flash components, repetitive loading screen and animation over pages will become annoying.

2. It's all about experience

Conventions are your friends

- Steve Krug, author of Don't Make Me Think

Breaking conventions for the sake of breaking the conventions are not innovation. And if you can't innovate, there's nothing wrong with following the current. Walking on familiar grounds makes your user feels safer.

3. Minimize learning curve

If one is presented a page like this, wonder what should one do?

4. KISS (Keep It Simple, Stupid)

Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.

- Antoine de Saint-Exupery

5. Don't rely on graphics

Not all pictures says a thousand words, in fact most stock pictures says nothing at all. Here are the top 3 photo search result of 'web design' from iStockPhoto. Is it saying a thousand words?

What about full flash site? Well aside from SEO problem, flash sites doesn't have a good user experience, users can't jumped directly into a certain page. And doesn't allow them to share links, pictures, or articles with friends. I know that these can be done in flash, but the harsh reality is most flash designers don't (or don't know how to) do it.

6. Graceful downgrade

Since the early days of websites, we have seen a warning text in the footer of sites, 'best viewed in 1024 x 768 screen resolution,' it doesn't mean that screen with resolution 800 x 600 is SOL. These days, in my opinion, it's okay not to support IE6 if your site requires the alpha transparency from PNG pictures, or html5. You should have a fair warning for IE6 users.

Adapted from 6 Things Video Games Can Teach Us About Web Usability

#2 first impression

I don't think using HTML email for marketing, unless you really have to put in some of the product images, the HTML should still look like plain text email. A full-on HTML email with 2-3 column layout just alerting viewers first spam alert.

#3 using your brand

Putting identifiable from name, and a logo in the signature should be more than enough. A full navigation from your site inside email is just adding more noise and distraction from your intended pitch.

#5 personalise email messages

I think this should be taken to a step further. Create a personalised url, http://website.com/this-email-title/john-smith, this way you can quickly see who's interested with your pitch, in what demographic is that user? Are more people in that demographic responded as well with this pitch? And should I start placing ads in magazines with the particular demographic as target market.

#8 content is king

As described in http://four.sentenc.es/ email contents should be treated like SMS. Short and clear. 1 paragraph containing your elevator pitch with a link (read above) that explains more about the pitch/product. If you are just sending out news or blog post instead of marketing pitch, it should be just the excerpt of the post.

#11 put some time between mail-outs and don't pitch the same crap over and over and over again. If you are to send email every week, you should let your customer know and have them re-confirm when you're importing their email (there's an option to choose when you're importing email to campaign monitor). I've seen a company shrunk their database from 10,000 to 8,000 in 2 months, including a few nasty replies and 1 angry phone call from a customer.

As described by this quote from Black Hat Forum, we are heading to the right direction,

Google caffeine is up for fighting with real time searches on twitter & faceboook

Add / update content frequently or you may loose on some more rankings

I searched for seo in google caffeine. it showed me facebook page from japan, which was recently updated. And had some content releated to seo, but not search engine optimization, It was meant for some other abbvr.

Caffeine would more probably rely on fresh content

It seems to be giving an increased weighting on domain authority & some authoritative tag type pages ranking (like Technorati tag pages, wordpress tag pages, propeller tags, etc)

You have got to make your domain more authorative in terms of traffic, content and links.

They are also putting slightly more weight on exact match domain names. In a way, we should focus on spamming these high authority sites to get the search traffic....

We need to look at ways how we can get our links on those social media pages...

Search quality is a big factor in changing visitors to buyers online, and in making customers happy too. Visitors spend an average of just eight seconds before deciding whether or not to remain on a website, so having a good search tool is important for turning visitors into buyers. Google Commerce Search is hosted by and uses Google search technology to make online retail searching both fast and customizable — visitors to your online store can sort by category, price, brand or any other attribute. E-store administrators can highlight special products or connect related ones so searching is easier for their customers. Google Commerce Search includes a built-in spellchecker and synonyms so if visitors can't remember exactly how to spell the particular toy or perfume or anything else they're hunting for, Google Commerce Search will make some suggestions. Choosing the right one is up to them, though.

Google Commerce Search is hosted in the cloud, meaning it lives online, so e-commerce sites can get up and running quickly. Using a cloud search tool will also help site owners meet the rise in demand from the holiday rush without having to devote extra time or resources to worrying about their capacity or infrastructure. Online retailers are free to focus on their business, while Google focuses on search, and shoppers can find what they need faster.

For more information check out google.com/commercesearch.