The excel tool is based on the Capability Maturity Model, which will be familiar to you if you’re a software engineers or business analyst. (keep reading - I promise it’s far more interesting than I’ve made it sound so far…).

CMM is a tool used to plot how close your organisation is to proven ‘best practice’ in its business processes. It’s the kind of thing that a consultant would charge you an arm and both legs to run through and you’d STILL think you got value for money. So picking Dave’s tool up for free is a big bonus.

The Digital Strategy tool focuses entirely on Digital Marketing &, in theory, tells you whether you have poor/average/good digital processes & where you can improve.

How Does it Work?

The excel tool asks you a series of questions about your current capabilities. These are posed as statements, against each you rate your current capability on a scale from 0 to 5:

• We manage online reputation in communities and social networks proactively
• We are effective in natural search and online public relations
• We have flexibility & budget to trial new digital marketing approaches
• We can track multichannel interactions and the value they generate effectively

Once you’ve answered the questions Following that, the tool spits out a ‘radar graph’ comparing your current capability (the pink shape in the image below) against the ideal (the blue edges):

What’s the point in all this?

Essentially it’s a framework tool. It says “This is where you’re at today” & “This is the perfect state you should head towards”. We do that every day with money, clickthroughs and visitors (”how much revenue did the website make today?”) but there are fewer tools available for showing us where we’re at in terms of processes.

The key benefit of a regular web analytics tool is it tells you “this is where you’re at today in terms of visitors and revenue”. The key benefit of the benchmark tool is it says “this is where you’re at today in terms of business processes”. From there you can say “this is what we need to do to improve…”.

The juror posted a poll on her own Facebook profile asking friends to vote on whether they thought the defendant was guilty or not guilty.

The interesting thing is not that this happened - things like this probably go on all the time in pubs around the country. What makes this different is that it was done through Facebook (with open privacy settings) so it was simple to spot & prove.

Found via BrandRepublic.

The poll takers were:

• Women aged 25-54
• Have children / interested in family, babies, education

The report references an eMarketer report: “more than 40% of all women who go online in the US are mothers who have children under 18 at home”

A couple of the key findings include:

• Blogs & Forums are most popular media (admittedly ‘photos’, ‘videos’, ‘apps & widgets’ & ‘groups’ were the other media categories - not sure many people would say “Yes, I use widgets”)
• Most popular interests within social media (in order of preference) are TV, Business, Politics, Living, Fashion, Economics

Download the full report over at Lotame Learnings

So just think for a second - what would the richest man in the World’s website look like?

Well, Warren Buffet is CEO of Berkshire Hathaway, a company that sits at number 11 in the Fortune 500. They hold a decent chunk of American Express, Coke, Goldman Sachs, P&G, Kraft, Tesco & dozens of other major brands.

Here’s a screenshot of the current Berkshire Hathaway website:

So the question is: Are they making a mistake here?

Intuition & common sense say “Yes”. Big company websites don’t look like that (at least not since 1996). It’s not pretty enough. They don’t even have a ’search’ box. etc.

But actually this site works just fine. Here’s why:

1. Berkshire Hathaway’s direct customers are CEOs, shareholders, and Warren Buffet fans. BH’s business is not going to suffer in any way as a result of having a website like this.
2. If you’re visiting Berkshire Hathaway’s site, you’re looking for information. While it’s not perfect, the site is definitely straightforward; you can find your way around as easily as on any other corporate site. It is just straight info.
3. Warren Buffet has a ‘no frills, no nonsense’ image. He lives in the same house he bought 50 years ago for $30k. Rather than damaging his image, this site reinforces it & fits perfectly with his story.

(By the way - if you visit the site - make sure to check out their commemorative cards!)

Linda Bustos takes a look at McAfee Hacker Safe logos over at GetElastic:

McAfee provide free A/B testing to ‘prove’ to you that their logo increases conversion. They run the test with the McAfee badge vs no badge. As Guy Redwood points out - it would be interesting to see how this would hold up against a generic badge.

Rich Page is giving away a free ebook: Improve Your Website for Free:

The snag is you have to sign up to his emails. Just kidding - not really a snag - Rich is a web analyst for a fortune 500; he publishes some great content focusing around web analytics & conversion.

Tamara Gielen has a nice summary of July’s “US Email Marketing Volume Forecast” paper from Forrester:

The highlight number is their forecast that 838-billion email marketing messages will be sent in the USA in 2013. If my maths is right, that’s just under 3,000 marketing emails per US citizen. Assuming 70% of the USA is online, that’s about 12 emails per person per day. Sounds more if you say 838-billion right?!

Kieron Donoghue noted the stream of vulturous Google Ads clawing at the bones of the failed UK airline XL:

Similar ads are floating around for other big - especially HBOS & Lehman.

Interesting to see the mix here: PriceWaterhouseCoopers & the NYTimes are vying for top position against the search term ‘lehman’. The PWC ads link through to a video press release. Clever, very cheap little piece of brand marketing!

NYT on the other hand, not so clever: They must have a huge pile of Lehman content, but their ad points through to a generic Lehman company bio page.

And finally, Seth Godin is having some fun with UGC again:

Spotlight Ideas posted a ‘Top 250 blog posts’ linkbait, containing 20 or so of Seth’s posts. He’s collected those 20 posts together into a list & put them up for the public vote using his Squidoo widget.

Take a look at this picture & see which words you notice first:

If you were asked to pick out the words ‘absolute luminance’, how long would it take you? Now if you were asked to pick out the words ‘visual perception’, could you pick them out quickly?

This probably seems like a ridiculous exercise - it’s totally obvious, right? But there are so many websites that miss the key point here:

You can choose what your visitors notice & what order they notice it in. You can guide your viewer’s eye around the page.

If ‘Sign Up For Our Free Email Newsletter‘ is the one link that determines the success or failure of your business, make sure you put visual emphasis on it. Don’t just slide it neatly & subtly into the page where it won’t be noticed.

Put your key elements in the right spots, give them the right colour & size. Choose style that fit your site but make sure you are pushing the most important elements to your visitors’ eyes rather than simply assuming your visitors will pull out the key info among the rest of your content.

One day, “cuil” was an ugly typo, the next it was being coughed up as “the new google” all over the web, on 24-hour tv news & in the middle pages of newspapers across the world.

Within 24 hours of launch, 5,696 people had bookmarked cuil at del.icio.us. To put that in context, that’s 5 times as many del.icio.us adds as Barack Obama’s official website has had to date.

So how’d they do it?

The simple answer is: very straightforward PR.

If you ever plan to put out a press release, you should take a look at the cuil launch release on their site. It’s a very standard press release, with some nice hooks tucked in there to appeal to the average journalist.

The hooks cuil tried to push

Here are the hooks cuil tried to push in their launch press release:

1. Biggest search engine: ‘120 billion web pages indexed’, ‘3x more than any other search engine’
2. Different look: ‘magazine-style layout’ (bound to appeal to a magazine journalist, you’d have thought)
3. Different results: ‘unlike any other search engine…’
4. Privacy protection: this point appears 3 or 4 times through the short release

The hooks that stuck in the media

Not all of cuil’s hooks stuck. ‘Privacy’ & ‘Different look’ didn’t even get a mention in some articles, whereas some other elements were totally focused on:

Biggest search engine.
This is always a winner: biggest, fastest, strongest, shortest… extremes & ‘records’ are utterly failsafe themes- especially combined with nice-looking stats. Almost every article mentions “3x bigger than Google”.

Ex-Google employees.

The fact that cuil has at least one ex-Google employee was tucked away in the cuil release, with a single passing mention. Yet every single article managed to pick out this fact. Many made it the headline/core of the piece. Why? Because it has totally universal appeal:

1. We’ve all heard of Google.
2. We all know Yahoo was once toppled by Google & part of us believes it could happen again.
3. The risk that paid off: “Why would anyone leave Google?” we think, “To make something even more successful than Google!” is the answer many of these articles hint at.

Perhaps including this as only a passing mention worked in cuil’s favour: The journalist who picks up the press release thinks “great, I’ve found a gem tucked away here” rather than thinking “yawn, another spoon-fed press release for me to reword”.

Genuine?

Reading many of the day-1 Cuil articles, it’s patently obvious the writers don’t believe Cuil has any chance at beating Google. Yet few writers say this outright; they all act under the pretense that it could ‘kill’ Google.

And that is something to remember when you come to put out a press release: You’re not writing a persuasive document, you’re simply providing the tools to tell a story.

I’ve been doing some work that means I’ve had to buy a few more email lists lately & mail other people’s lists.

An in-house list is always better than a bought one, but, if you need to buy email lists, here are a few more simple tips to save you money & increase your results…

Tip #1: Skip the addresses that won’t work

If you’re buying an email list, ask for these email addresses to be stripped out:

• info@domain.com
• sales@domain.com
• support@domain.com
• admin@domain.com
• webmaster@domain.com

These are the most standard addresses for a domain. ie. the ones every spam program out there will automatically mail.

After years of being spammed, those addresses probably aren’t used any more. Stripping them out before you buy the list means you’ll pay less money & get the same results.

Tip #2: Run a trial - it can save you thousands

Imagine you’re a restauranteur looking for a new house red. Would you buy 20 cases of wine without tasting it? Or would you buy 3 bottles & try them out with a few customers first?

You can do the same with email lists. Instead of buying a broadcast to 3 million addresses for $50,000. Buy a tiny portion of the list to try it out first. If you pay $500 to email a few thousand people and it works out, buy the rest of the list. If it doesn’t work out - losing $500 and learning the list stinks is better than losing $50k for the same lesson.

Tip #3: Be honest with your recipients

What do you do when you receive an email out of the blue, with no explanation how the sender found your details? You delete it right? Or maybe you hit the ’spam’ button.

Let’s say you’re running a new email campaign: If you just bought a list from Joe Bloggs Inc, then feel free to start your email with “Joe Bloggs thought you might be interested in our offer”. That way the recipient doesn’t think you’re a total spammer.

Where & How To Get Content Part 1: Do It Yourself

The easiest way to start getting web content together is to create it yourself: Nothing to organise, no need to communicate your vision to someone else. Here are a few of the good & bad bits of creating your own content:

Great: The big pro of DIY content writing is that it’s *exactly* how you want it.

Great: Zero risk. If you write something & it’s not great, you’ve lost nothing and - hopefully - learned something.

Great: No money. Though your time isn’t free, you don’t need to have anything in the bank to create your own content.

Great: Learn & communicate. If you’re looking to learn about something, or to reach out to other people across the world, there’s no better way than by speaking for yourself on the web.

Depending on your situation, the cons of putting together your own web content can often outweigh the pros.

Bad: It doesn’t scale at all. If you can write 1 article per day, then you’re stuck with a 1-article-per-day website.

Bad: DIY content depends on your time. When your other priorities go up, your content slows down.

Bad: It ties you up. Could you move forward faster if your time weren’t tied up writing content? Accountants call this the ‘opportunity cost’: Let’s say you buy $100 of fish on monday, and you sell them for $500 on friday. That’s a 500% profit. But, while you had that $100 tied up in fish stock, you could have made 10 other deals & twice as much money.

Of course - if you’re a bigger business - many of these problems disappear. “Yourself” could be the 600 people your company employs. If you’re an insurance company, get your customer support team to note down all of the questions & answers they get. Publish them straight onto the web & you’ve got a huge asset.

Top navigation, left & right. Breadcrumbs, headers, footers. We usually think of them all as having only one function: Getting your visitors from A to B.

But - on top of that - really good navigation can help a website achieve some big essential tasks.

1. The Obvious Bit: Good Navigation Lets You Find What You’re Looking For

Hopefully this should be obvious: Navigation gets your visitors to where they’re going. If your visitors can’t get where they need to on your site, then your navigation needs looking at.

Side Note: a simple way to improve this element of your navigation is to note down some key tasks your visitors would want to perform (or key tasks you want visitors to perform) & then watch what happens when a few test subjects (even if it’s just friends, family & colleagues) try to do it.

2. Good Navigation Tells You Exactly What A Site’s About

When you visit a site for the first time, there are several clues to the topic of the site & the scope of it. For example, if you look at this site, up at the top it leads with ‘Online Marketing Advice’. That gives you the general subject area.

Perhaps more important than that, down the left, there are a few navigational categories: “Copywriting”, “Search Engine Optimisation”, “Paid Search Marketing”, etc. At a one-second glance, this tells you the range of topics covered on the site.

The same is true on many other sites (and can be true of your site). Here’s a glimpse of Amazon’s old top navigation:

Amazon started selling books. Today they sell thousands of products across a range of categories. If you take a look at the navigation above, you can immediately understand the full range they sell. Even without thinking about it. The same is true of sites you visit for the first time. If your navigation is set up nicely, a quick glance will tell your visitors exactly what your site covers.

3. Good Navigation Gives You A Mental Map

First off - is this important? Does it matter whether your visitors have a mental picture of the structure of your site? Well think back to a time when you’ve been in an unfamiliar neighbourhood. Think about the uncertainty in your head - are you going in the right direction? Is it safe here? Is what you’re looking for here? What else is here?

This is an important part of a website: Making visitors feel comfortable & familiar, and helping them to understand where they fit into it.

So how does this work? How can navigation achieve this? To carry on using Amazon as an example, here’s their new primary navigation:

A quick look at this not only tells you what Amazon sell, it also tells you exactly how it’s all organised, and gives you a perfect picture of the size and complexity of their store. Like a tube map:

Imagine you’re standing at a tube station & you know nothing about the tube network. A single look at the map tells you the size of the network, the number of lines, as well as how to get from A to B.
Your navigation can do exactly the same. If a visitor is on one page of your site, very good navigation can condense all of the complexities, the different areas, routes, types of content. Good navigation can put all of this information into a single, easy-to-understand mental picture.