Month: August 2009

The morning after Gnomedex

Gnomedex 9 at the Bell Harbor Conference Center was everything it was cracked up to be and well worth the $300 price tag for two days. (Yes, you should register to attend next year.)

Some of the best minds at the intersection of technology and social media were on stage, most of them giving frank, unvarnished presentations. The classroom/style auditorium (free wifi, plenty of outlets, great visibility, not-so-great chairs) was just the right size, and easy to get around in between sessions so you could chat with other participants.

People were friendly; three of the folks I ended up chatting with in the hallways and the dining room turned out to be invited speakers: cyber anthropologist Amber Case, Micah Baldwin (inventor of Twitter’s Follow Friday meme who blogs at learntoduck.com), and Mark Horvath, a former media exec and former homeless person who does guerilla public relations at invisiblepeople.tv for homeless communities (“some content may be offensive. Our hope is you’ll get mad enough to do something.”).

I also had the opportunity to meet Christine Peterson of the Foresight Institute (an expert on open source sensing and nanotechnology who talked about life extension), Phil Plait (who writes the Bad Astronomy column at Discover), and Bre Pettis. Bre’s three-dimentional printer, demo-ed onstage an in the lobby, was unquestionably the hit of the convention.

The “un-convention” session on Saturday was an opportunity for me to give a 1-minute presentation on a type of social media data I’ve been exploring.

Speaking at Gnomedex (photo: Alberto Serafin Lopez)
Speaking at Gnomedex (photo: Alberto Serafin Lopez)

I came home with ideas, inspirations, and a stack of business cards from people who said “Let’s talk about this.” One of those cards is from a social media executive I’d love to work with.

But I came home to a sizeable pile of small, low-return projects with firm deadlines that will fill all of my time until I leave town on vacation next week. I’ve made promises to people that those small details will be taken care of. And I keep my promises.

So…which do I do? Pursue the big opportunities, or keep my promises?

The betting is open. I’ll report back at the end of the week.

Fake FAQs

Marketers have borrowed the FAQ format from instructional websites in the hopes of giving complex, confusing, and discouraging information about their products the appearance of user friendliness.

Why do websites have FAQs? Why don’t they just answer their visitors’ burning questions right on the web pages themselves? Isn’t that the heart of sales and customer services?

Jeff Sexton makes the case against FAQs this week on the blog at the marketing site GrokDotCom.com.

However, I think he’s going up against a straw man. In my experience, while a few companies may be naively burying compelling marketing content on the FAQ page, most are using the FAQ page to hide problems. They use it as a dumping ground for required warnings and other “small print” disclaimers, as well as a place to put the ugly details about cumbersome naming or numbering conventions that can’t be rationally or quickly explained on marketing pages.

In short, marketers have borrowed the FAQ format from instructional websites in the hopes of giving complex, confusing, and discouraging information about their products the appearance of user friendliness.

Here’s an example from HP’s refurbished-products sales site. This FAQ answers the burning questions “How can I tell what the desktop form factors are?” and “How do I decipher part numbers for refurbished products?” (Warning: The answers to these questions may lead people who do user-facing design to bang their heads on the their own desktops — regardless of form factor.)

When the saint comes marching in

Englishman offended by the municipal authorities’ decision to “dumb down” his street’s name (from “St. John’s Close” to “St. Johns Close”) he returned his local street signs to the proper singular possessive — using paint and a paint brush.

I’ve studied with two of the best news editors who ever lived (the late Tim Cohane and Irv Horowitz) and worked under some pretty damn good ones.

So my hat is off to Stefan Gatward, of Tunbridge Wells, England. According to this UPI report, Mr. Gatward was so offended by the municipal authorities’ decision to “dumb down” his street’s name (from “St. John’s Close” to “St. Johns Close”) that he returned his local street signs to the proper singular possessive using paint and a paint brush.

SEO: How far do you need to go?

SEO "travel" planning
SEO "travel" planning

I talked last week with a web designer who wanted to help his clients get SEO services — either by providing them himself or by connecting them to good SEO analysis companies.

His problem? Many of the small business “brochure” sites he designs cost the client less than $2000. Yet when he went to read up on SEO services, he saw companies charging $40,000 to “do” SEO for a site.

What on earth, he wondered, were they doing? And how could one of his smaller clients afford SEO?

I tried to explain:

Choosing SEO is a lot choosing transportation for a trip. It depends on how far you need to go, what type of terrain you are going to cover, how quickly you want to get there, and whether you want to go coach or first class. Another important factor is whether this is a one-time trip, or whether it will be a regular commute.

So…you could walk, ride a bicycle, get crammed into a bus that stops every few blocks, rent a car, or hire a private jet. The options are endless. Now, back to your travel needs:

How far do you need to go? What terrain are you trying to cover?

If you are the only business offering advanced Yogavadian therapy sessions in Seattle, the answer is: Not far. Your offerings are unique, and all you need is a basic website with SEO keywords like Yogavadian therapy and Seattle (in text, title, and meta tags) and you’re pretty much set. Frequent updates to the website (such as regular blogging) would be the icing on the cake.

The SEO example above is truly common sense, and the designer could easily provide that type of SEO.

But what if you are one of 800 or more massage therapists in the greater Seattle area, and your practice provides a fairly common range of therapies.

You face a long journey, over fairly rough terrain. And it’s unlikely that a web designer can do much to get you to your destination.

Many of the SEO options would require that you circle back to consider the overall marketing strategies for the practice itself: Do you want to create a distinctive brand? What keywords are your clients and potential clients already searching on to find you, or similar services? Do you want to advertise a particular type of massage work, or do you want to focus on services to a particular neighborhood in Seattle. Clearly, this type of strategic SEO requires a big investment of time and resources, and is likely to be coordinated with a marketing/advertising campaign.

The SEO “travel planning” is, of course, much different if the company involved is large and has resources to hire an expert to do SEO analysis. I’ll write about that in a later post.