Category — Life

I’ve come on to several new products in the past few weeks; one is Clickable, a web based application to manage and optimize your PPC campaigns, and second is Outside.in for publishers. I love the fact that both of these great tools allow you to test their features, judge their value to your needs, and then make an informed purchasing decision.

One of the biggest fears I have, and most consumers have, is the fear of post purchase doubt. I don’t want to feel wrong, and I don’t want to fret that I’m making the wrong decision. I mean I have trouble clicking “Send” on emails some times because I’m nervous there is a typo or an ambiguous phrase somewhere, so I am ridiculously meticulous about any major purchases or commitments. So one of my favorite things, both as a consumer and as a marketer and creator of goods, is the ability to try it before you buy it.

How can I make an informed decision to purchase this x thousand dollar tool if I don’t know its going to work for me. Sure it works for them, but they’re not me, I want to see it work for me. You would never buy a car without a test drive (at least I wouldn’t), so why would I commit thousands of dollars and hours towards something if I can’t give it a whirl around the block first?

The ability to test something out gives the feeling of confidence in your product that both consciously and sub-consciously builds trust in your product. It gives consumers the extra bit of assurance needed to make a commitment. As a consumer it shows the producer is willing to stake the deal on their ability to deliver, and as a producer it makes me feel comfortable asking for a bigger sale. When everyone at the table is happy, the deal goes smoothly and everyone can walk out with their head up knowing they are confident in their decisions.

I understand why most companies don’t give their products out for free to try, because they are scared people will return them. And some people always will because its just not possible to please everyone at the same time. Sometimes its not the right fit, but if you’re willing to extend the confidence in your product to a test drive, its going to reap rewards, build relationships and ultimately end with bigger, better deals and happier customers.

In the beginning of July, my company decided to hire an SEO consultant to help us with a few problems we are having getting some of our content indexed. Since we launched a new version of our sites, we went from over 15k people a month to under 6k. Thats a big problem.

So we did the natural thing, started addressing the problem and after a good amount of frustration we got help. We spoke to a bunch of the best names in the industry, and chose a young company out started by a few people with varying degrees of experience in the SEO industry, but they were aggressive, defensive of the skills and passionate about what they could deliver.

We recieved an unbelieveably thorough site audit, which we were ecstatic about. Dozens of little tweaks, major architecture issues and some rather obvious stuff that we just needed a fresh set of eyes to notice. We implemented almost all the recommended changes, along with some other tweaks we unconvered as I began to implement them. They were a huge help and awesome to work with.

The thing is, I know SEO. I’ve been doing it for 3 years. I’ve been quietly attending conferences and workshops since 2005, I’ve built a company around getting found online, I know how to do this - successfully. (search “providence restaurants” - thats all me) But when crafting an entire Content Management System, from scratch there is so much to do. So much to keep in mind, and so many hundreds of little things that can screw up your rankings, or take you off the map completely.

We came off the map. We had some high profile rankings in the top 3 of Google, lots of traffic, only to fall out of the top 100.

Crawling back is an art. Crafting a site that the engines can dig is like making an elaborate painting. There is a proven technique to make the right brush strokes. There are certain types of paint and canvas that are better than others, but when its all said in done, you have to make the strokes, on the canvas, with the paint and bring it all together into something beautiful.

There is no secret forumula, it isn’t witchcraft but its certainly not a science. You have to do all the little things right, through some magic and hope in there, and wait for the bots. Its kind of like the invasion of Zion, only you want a nice picnic waiting for them.

The power of your competing with your friends for trophies has been a force since man first evovled from ape. Whoever killed the biggest animal fed the most people, and gained fame throughout the land. Today there are many trophies, many competitions and most of us have a bunch of friends. In today’s world of hyper connectivity, we can stay in touch with friends and acquaintances just as if they lived across the hall. This leads us to follow our innate competitive instincts and make a bunch of stuff over which we can compete peacefully. In this hyer-connected world, we have many examples of how games and trophies become popular, sought after and create successful businesses. The NFL is based on competition, Major League Baseball, UEFA,  The Olympics, all multi-billion dollar businesses built around the peaceful exploitation of competition.

But there are other levels of competition, ranging from who has the nicest car, to who has the most followers on Twitter. Us crazy people spend hundreds of hours, thousands of dollars and massive resources to win the imaginary trophies that the world offers to us. But alot of these games are fun, meaningless ways to interact with your friends and associates. Zombie Toss on Facebook, ReTweeting and now the ultimate example - Foursquare.

Foursquare captures all the potential of Twitter, and makes a fun game around who can go to more places and “check in” You can become the mayor of your favorite coffee shop, win badges for hitting multiple spots in a night, and show off your badges to all of your hermit friends. The intriguing game of checking in and badges is only the front of what could become a brilliant business idea, and I believe will capture the potential value of twitter to many of the small businesses staring aimlessly at a little baby-blue bird.

What Twitter first started out as, and what got me intrigued was the ability to broadcast where I am, to the people who cared. Now Twitter has become much more than that, but Foursquare takes that fundamental use-case, and makes a fun game out of it. It tracks and records where I go, how often I go, and withwhom I go (of course, only when I tell it). This information is absolutely invaluable to small businesses. Deli’s can learn their customers favorite sandwiches, discover problems in their offerings, and find out who their best customers really are. Then they could be able to send out offers to those customers who “checked in” They could build an email database to lure those customers back in. There are so many business applications to Foursquare, so many more obvious ones than for Twitter itself, I would buy Foursquare if I were Twitter - like tomorrow.

Foursquare is a fun application that takes human nature’s desire to see their friends and show off their trophies and turns it into a desire to go out more, tell the world where they are and win some meaningless badges. But all that adds up to great data for small businesses, great marketing opportunities for those businesses and a whole bunch more percieved immediate value than simple twitter feeds (to small businesses). Instead of trolling through twitter searches, I can just go to my business page on Foursquare and see what people are saying - and who’s coming.

I have several great takeaways from Foursquare’s app, but really its fun and it makes me want to go out more so I can check in again. Who doesn’t like badges?

I hope you are looking at that beautiful picture of LUCKY DOG! If not, all those pics are ones I’ve taken in the past year.

The motivation for my new layout came from reading this post http://www.jehutson.com/2009/01/being-bored/. It got me fired up and I realized I need to get more of my thoughts down here, because its great to look back on my thoughts and ideas, especially the ones I share with the world.

I love the towns we operate in. They all have so much going on, lots of great people and a sense of civic pride that makes them fun to live in, and fun to visit. And I love our websites. As we’ve grown and are now in our 4th iteration of our websites, I have seen so much change. Yelp started the same month we did (no need to make fun, I know how the two tracks look ), but more than Yelp, it was the start of user reviews, user generated content and the truly social web. I hate the term Web 2.0 more and more, it really is a good term for it, however it has become such a buzzword that only people who missed what the last 3 years online were about are using it.

The internet provides such a great platform for people to share their thoughts and ideas. Photos videos, reviews - who ever thought we would care so much about what other people had to say, I mean the 90’s was all about “whatever” and “as if”. Well I guess now people are talking to their friends online rather than to the hand, which is probably a good thing. But the web today is all about different ways of sharing content. People keep creating new ways of sharing it, of creating it and of consuming it. Its really exciting.

Running a small business is really tough these days. I see it every day establishments go out of business, our customers tell us their woes and people are spending less when they go out. But you run into those people who are making the best of it, being happy and enjoying a positive outlook. I don’t even know what this post is about really, I’m just really excited about things today. Being as I am bipolar I will probably be miserable next week, but today I’m psyched.

We’re launching a bunch of great features over the next few weeks, alot of things are finally getting settled. And of course we’ve had 5 days in a row of sunshine. That never hurt anyone

I’ve been extremly busy for the past few months, and I haven’t really had time to post here. I’m sorry to have neglected you for so long, but I’ll be back one of these days

Thats what they need. Love is all they need.

Show small businesses some love, show them your marketing will work for them and then show them some more love. There are so many hawkish businesses out there out to grab a dime (not steal, just take) without being grateful. We operate with the idea that our customers make our business run and that we should be thankful and grateful.

Times like these, everyone can use a hug. OK, maybe you don’t have to actually hug them, but let your clients know you are their for them.

I was in the gym today and Fox News was on. I’m a hating fan of Bill O’Reilly (the guys an idiot but hes so awesome). But Hannity came on next and I just cant stand him. He is so negative. He opened the nights news with an announcement that appeared like it was daily. “Today was day 35 of False Hope and No Change” REALLY? Can you not support the President of our country now!? After spending 8 years bashing anyone who critized Bush for “being unpatriotic.” I digress…

People are too Negative these days. It affects the way we work, the way we think and the way we interact with each other. Our moods are down, and they rub off on other people.  This article on LifeOptimizer.org (what a sick name) goes into the details of why you shouldn’t watch the news too often. This isn’t news to me, and it came out a few days ago, but it brought some thought to me today. I had a great day, I cleaned my inbox out, got my list done entirely before noon - it was great. I didn’t check the news or twitter all afternoon becuase I was so busy. And I’m psyched I didn’t.

The market tanked again today. Theres nothing I can do about it, so there is no reason to worry about it. Of course there are lots of reasons why I should, but they are all worrisome, depressing thoughts. Lets just call this a recession, realize it sucks and stop sh*tting on ourselves everytime bad news breaks.

Or maybe we could just ignore the news for a few days and relax. Gain some inner wa.

I am spending my first trip to San Francisco working and taking in the culture. I’ve been attending SMX West, getting some great knowledge, meeting some really interesting people and really exploring the power of Twitter. I installed tweetdeck so I could monitor the conversations happening in other sessions. I made some new friends through the online conversation, then I met them offline after the sessions. The world of SEO is a funny one and there are some pretty clear thought leaders in the field. Its exciting to be meeting and learning from them out here.

The real takeaway I’m getting from this was accentuated by a second post from Fred Wilson I just read with my morning coffee. Its about Status (facebook/twitter status) and how it is quickly becoming integrated into our social fabric. In a way it is sort of becoming our social fabric. I explained to my girlfriend why Twitter is interesti by relating it to Facebook Status, or Gmail/AIM away messages. In college I would put real thought into my away message when I went to class/lunch/out. Some people would be “boring” and put “class” up, and others would say things like “enduring another endless rant form my crazed finance professor” - Thats interesting, and its not a need to know, but it can make me laugh and it can make me want to meet someone I might only know through class or passing in the hall.

As more and more people are using Twitter and more and more functionality becomes available through their API, its only going to get cooler. And the potential to integrate a single update to your Twitter account and your Faceboook is really exciting! We are working on a solution to this right now, and its going to be live in a few weeks (focused on getting small businesses involved). Twitter is just so freakin cool, there’s no reason anyone should be afraid to jump in.

Fred’s posts are typically very inteligent and this Status post (read along with Truth) is certainly no exception. But today I feel extra energized to be involved, even in just a tiny way as a user, in this media revolution thats occuring. Its happening right now and i fantastic! Maybe its the atmosphere out here, maybe its just this week immersed in my geek side of life, but I think its all of those things and just a general feeling that better things are coming.

For now, I’m going to keep living my life 140 charachters at a time and I’m going to get as many people I can to start doing that too. Because the more people who are contributing the better the interaction will be, the better the content will be and the better off we all will be. If I can get my girlfriend to twitter, I can get you too…

I just read a very interesting post by Fred Wilson on the extreme loss of jobs this economy has seen recently. Then I came across this post by Greg Sterling (smart guy, loves local). But the response to one of his questions really pissed me off. Its somethings thats been hurting the micro-world of start-ups more and more. Its contributing to the erosion of creative capital.

Is there a revenue model?

Revenue models will exist, but they’re a low priority at the moment.

Now I realize there are alot of companies that have been founded and been successful with the idea that first we need to make a great product that everyone will love, then we’ll make money. I don’t mean to pick on the particular company being mentioned, the tone just bothered me. But I get frustrated that many (I would guess 85% of the start-ups on TechCrunch) start-ups that are highlighted in media and receiving great press all over the blogosphere, don’t even have a plan for a revenue model. Not even a plan.

Everything in life can’t be free. Its just not possible. Users expect everything to be free these days, but its the same problem that built so many consumers into such scary debt. “Let someone else pay for it/ I’ll worry about it later.”

Fred’s post was about job creation, not just through starting new companies, but through creative thought in existing companies (maybe specifically how to look for a job in those companies). But down in the comments it gets fleshed out that people need to create viable businesses that enable commerce or build sustainable businesses with customers in order to create jobs.

What bothers me about the whole situation here is that stupid blogs out there are so lazy that they just report whatever it is that comes into their inbox. Stupid companies that add a fancy little widget to shorten my Twitter posts are great. Thanks, but how many jobs is that going to create? Twitter is awesome, its like the invention of the key-pad phone over the rotary, its a platform for communication and it serves a great purpose. I have no doubt they will figure out a way to make money (or someone will whose doing the same thing). But can people please stop fussing about random little companies that admittedly don’t have a plan to make money, don’t do anything special or different, and generally don’t do anything?

Point here is there are alot of companies that are hiring. They are growing, they are adding value to their communities and they are creating jobs! They maybe only 3 jobs, maybe they are 8 jobs. But there are hundreds of companies out there hiring, and all we get to hear about is impending doom and the latest free iPhone app that shows girls in bikinis dancing.

I wonder what these guys think about? Consultants and professional bloggers… probably going to hire one soon tho