Joel Pinkham

It's now a cliche

It’s everywhere. Everyone has “trendy” icons plastered all over email/web marketing materials lately. “Find us on Facebook”, “Follow us on Twitter” or a “View me on LinkedIn”. It’s at the stage where it’s become noise.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t have an issue with people and companies “trying to connect with their audiences” but it’s pretty obvious a lot of it is done because they think they should or because someone else is doing it.

With so much media attention on Twitter lately, management types who likely don’t understand what’s happening will put the pressure on underlings to “setup a twooter” or perhaps make a “bookface fan page”. If everyone else is doing it, we HAVE to do it to stay competitive. Perhaps not a good philosophy.

The best example of it I’ve seen is with the ATO (Australian government tax organisation – same as the IRD or IRS). You can become a fan of completing a tax return using their e-tax software. Exciting stuff, people everywhere want to be a fan of tax returns.

Last time I saw it had 550 fans. In the scale of things, with 20+ million people in Australia and let’s say 10 million of those completing tax returns, it’s nothing. Why bother?

So what do I think you should do?

Evaluate if it’s going to really going to make a difference. Then make sure you’re going to follow through with it, so many people (including myself) might start something and not continue.

If you don’t understand what it is – try getting into something like Twitter on a personal level. Understand the dynamics of the twitter community so you can figure out how to leverage it for your company.

I haven’t followed through with Twitter myself, but notice I don’t promote my Twitter account?

I’ve just finished my first outsourced web project, and I don’t know how I could ever go back to paying a full rate. We paid US$15 an hour and after simply providing designs to get a Magento customisation, within a couple of weeks we had a fully functioning store made exactly to spec. Brilliant.

With a local agency on the other hand we would’ve paid a fortune, it would’ve taken longer and I wouldn’t be surprised if there was more of an issue.

It’s definitely changed my outlook – as long as you don’t need the advice and experience from a digital agency, why not outsource?

Probably the most cliched topic in blogs over the last week and I’m pretty late on the uptake. But how could I not write about it?

When I first heard things about Wave I was sceptical of revolution, but new it had to be good coming from Google.

I’m going to assume you know enough about what Google Wave is before I have my rant, if you don’t then I strongly suggest you see the very, very short (1 hour, 20 minutes) video on YouTube about it (embedded below).

In short, it reinvents the way people communicate pulling together email, instant messaging, social networking plus any kind of sharing and collaboration into one place. Our as they describe it “What would email look like if it was invented today?”

It looks pretty amazing, I gasped with impressiveness multiple times throughout the video and I’m a nerd.

So what challenges do I speak of?

For it to become truly revolutionary, it needs to replace the way we do business. The corporate world will be the main thing that slows down Google Wave spreading. If we use it at work, people have to know how to use it.

Firstly there’s the IT Managers

These are the people that Microsoft thrive on, and Google are yet to crack. The almighty Corporate IT Manager. Most of these guys sit in Microsofts back pocket, I wouldn’t be surprised if there was a kickback system in place.

While we are progressing in tech savvyness,  the majority of people are still afraid of change when it comes to technology. Google Wave means huge change to everyday work, which will upset a lot of people. IT Managers always try to make everything smooth, and think that if they’re unnoticed then they’re doing a good job.

I don’t think they’ll have the balls to adopt Wave for a long, long while (which in tech years would be at least 4 years).

Enterprise providers who won’t go down without a fight

Google Wave will remove the need for private network links, software licensing, powerful computers and servers. This will piss a lot of companies off, a lot of big companies who won’t go down without a fight. Not sure how they will justify their costs, but I’d say if the likes of Microsoft, Verizon, Cisco and IBM banded together to keep things they way they are, they won’t be a pushover.

So what is so great about Wave anyway?

There’s too much to talk about, just watch the video.

Internet Explorer 3, sex on Windows

Reminiscing is always fun, I was recently having a laugh to myself how things used to be with the internet (which used to the “Internet” with a capital I – there’s even a Wikipedia article on internet capitalization).

I’m still only 22, but I made my first website when I was just 11 so I feel a bit like a wise old man when it comes to the web.

Things have come a long way over those years – here’s a brief history through my eyes.

1996

My first experience with the net. I had a friend from overseas email address. To use it I attempted to type it into the address bar and expected a view of their house from their computers point of view in Canberra. It may have seemed a stupid assumption (despite the fact I was 10 and from South Auckland where shoes were still something futuristic) but now with Skype it more or less works just like that.

1997

It's time to kick ass and chew bubble gum. And I'm all out of gum.

Got my first computer for a birthday/my parents wanted one anyone gift. Pentium 166 MMX, 32MB of RAM with a nice 14″ CRT screen running Windows 95. Pimping to say the least. We had a 33.6KBPS modem on Dialup that cost NZ$2.50 per hour.

I remember trying to download IE4 when it came out, I was so excited after reading about it in a computer magazine. The download kept failing as the dialup connect for often lose connection. I also was under the impression while downloading you couldn’l look at other sites as it’ll crash the download. I guess that wasn’t far from the truth.

I got a couple of games with the computer including classics such as Duke Nukem 3D and Quake.

None of my friends had the internet at this stage.

1998

This is when I started getting serious about the net. I downloaded and frequently used ICQ (chat client with similar to social network features – i.e. search and find people with similar interests to you). I remember every conversation started with “hey, ASL?”. Took me a search on Altavista to find out what that one meant.

I also made my first online purchase with a borrowed credit card (computer game on CD). I remember claiming it was an accident and I just was curious how it worked and liked filling out the form. I sure was a cunning little shit.

I tried online gaming for the first time (Red Alert). The players in the USA would always ask “cable?” before playing me. It was quite painful playing online with dialup.

Still none of my friends had the net, so I would often print things out I found interesting and take it to school/their houses. I guess this is a primitive form of Digg.

I also remember trying to burn CD’s to the computer (before MP3’s as far as I know) which took up 700MB of a tiny hard drive unless converted into Real Player format.

Building a website

My first web design tool, now probably made by Fisher Price

From there I got really stuck into being a part of the web thanks for MS FrontPage. Like every other 11 year old, I was obsessed with South Park. I built a South Park fan website and hosted it on a free service similar to Geocities (looking back Geocities was pretty impressive for its time).

The website had a tiled background image, stolen content and popup ads thanks to the free hosting service. It also receive hundred of visitors a day (according to Webalizer anyway) most of which came from Altavista search engine (of course this was before Google). I guess at this stage supply of websites to look at was so low that it wasn’t hard to reach a lot of the tiny audience.

I got so keen on making that website I faked being sick for an entire week to build the website.

Looking back I’m quite surprised with how easy it was to build and publish a website. Considering most people still wouldn’t have any idea where to start.

1999

Napster

Friends at school and the school itself more commonly had access to the net, it was getting to the stage where if you didn’t have it you were missing out.

The big highlight of 99 though was of course Napster which completely changed the way I and many others went about finding new music.

I absolutely loved Napster, I loved being able to download songs so easily when I used try to record onto cassette from the radio.

Some of the features were great too – you could chat with the person you were downloading from along with browsing all of their files.

I think Napster was the big thing that got the masses of the youth really into the web. It was a nice piece of bait that enticed us to embrace the internet as a whole. Well, I guess it was more a piece of jailbait.

2000 and beyond?

I’ll leave this blog post at that for now, already close to 1000 words. It’s easy to ramble about fond memories.

When I get around to out (sounds promising…) I’ll continue on with and finish my story of how I saw things progress.

Please post a comment with your own experiences, some of the things are pretty funny looking back I must say.

Whenever Facebook comes up in conversations, I like to make a point about how I think it has reached a level where too many people are using it and we have too many friends. This of course leads to a clutted book of faces, all of a sudden it’s looking like a blue and white Where’s Wally image.

Sure it’s all coming from your “friends” – but I think everyone will have friends on Facebook that they don’t care about hearing from.

So with the new and much criticised Facebook layout (by the lowest common denominator, of course), you can now hide friends/apps/pages from your news feed. Excellent! I can now still be friends with someone but don’t have to put up with the bollocks they post on Facebook.

Facebook Hide Feature

I was starting to get annoyed with Facebook because the amount of crap coming through to me, so now I’m a much happier user. The featue hasn’t been executed too obviously though. This will probably lead to more people like me who haven’t noticed it because it’s hidden until you mouse over.

Anyway, why is this feature important?

F’Book has hit critical mass – too many people are now using it. If you allow people to keep it relevant and interesting, then we’ll keep using it.

It’s always exciting to make a big change on your website – the people involved on the project always have an interest in making the site look “good” and “improving” it.

What happens so often though – we get it wrong.

The problem is these are very subjective changes. A lot of the time the good look changes harm functionality and results. Which in my mind, are more important.

I got it wrong

In the last few weeks I’ve been through this scenario. I’m confident I went about it the right way and know what I’m doing, but plain and simply I got it wrong.

I started off looking at the Analytics – seeing how people were using the homepage and understood the metrics that needed improving. Around these I creating a strategy to “improve” the stats and along the way make it “look better”.

In reality, bounce rate has risen from 40% to 55%. There has been some positives out of it, but 15% of your traffic now leaving the site instead of browsing is a huge amount of the audience lost.

My point is – what you think should be done on a website is often wrong.

Solution – Don’t think, TEST

Solution – don’t think, test. I don’t mean focus groups or asking user feedback. This particular homepage tested well in that regard. When the Analytics figures came in though, it failed.

The Amazon Test

Amazon are a perfect example for testing before implementing. When any change is to be made, they sample a small amount of their traffic and measure the impact.

For example before changing the location of the “add to cart” button on their product page, they would try 5 different options over 2% of their visitors and see which one increased conversion rate the most.

Unlike the real word though, they are fortunate enough to have the resources and the traffic to pull it off. If you’re only getting a couple of hundred visitors a day, this kind of test would take a long time. So do what you can within your means, but don’t assume anything.

I come from a background of working in the agency side, now in my current role I’ve had the chance to select a new agency for a project. The current company we were working with was a shocker, charging through the roof, pissing around and not knowing the definition of a deadline.

I went out on the hunt for companies through Google, industry bodies and asked for recommendations on LinkedIn. Eventually I ended up seeing 5 companies, which was quite a badly surprising experience with:

• Barely any preparation from some
• Obvious nerves from the people we were meeting
• Absolutely boring – some of them wanked on about things that really weren’t relevant

It got me to realise that I was once someone unprepared, nervous and boring. Glad to be gone from that side of the table I say.

We ended up choosing the smallest company from the bunch, without the blue chip client list and high profile portfolio – but they had “it”. 2 months down the track, they met the tight deadline and hit the budget and now we have myambition.

Key things that made these guys stand out and perform from the other guys was:

• No fat in the company structure – it’s ridiculous when a company of 18 has a CEO, 5 account managers, 3 in the project team with  50% doing any real work. It really costs the customer time to right through the many people
• First point of contact that knew their stuff – Account managers in web agencies are monkeys, they pull in someone with a tiny bit of sales experience who’s willing to accept a piss poor salary and in a multi-choice question would not know what HTML stood for
• No scheduling – We got a dedicated resource for the course of two months, one design, one developer – both with enough experience to handle it on their own. There wasn’t issues of having one week here and there to fit in with a ton of other clients
• Variable priced contract – Corporates love a fixed price contract, but they end up screwing over both parties. The agency puts a buffer in the budget to make sure they make money, expecting clients to make “unreasonable” changes and push out the man hours. What I’ve always seen happen is that, because it’s a fixed price the agency actually has to work harder in the planning phase to make sure everyone knows what they’re getting. It doesn’t work because it is so unflexible. Sure you need planning – and a lot of it but things will always change along the course of a web project, the beauty of the web is how easy to you can change, I don’t know why everyone takes the fixed priced options.

I don’t think I could ever go back to the agency world. Apart from the guys at Known who I’ve been working with, every agency I’ve seen is too small/unexperienced to put out a great website, or too big that it becomes a bigger project than it really is to pay a CEO salary, while the underpaid oompa-loompas on the floor do a rubbish job.

It’s as bad as the kid in school who writes a speach about speaches, so I apologise in advance for blogging about blogging.

I’m soon going to attempt to get a number of blogs setup at work – but of course I’m going to face challenges getting people into it. I’m confident I can make it work, but if I’m slack myself – how do I expect others to get into it?

There’s one reason why I’m slack. I started the blog to help myself get a job. I got a job, I stopped. Which leads me to the conclusion:

To be motivated to blog – you need to get something out of it in the short term.

It’s easy to say you get the best out of it in the long term – but it’s much easier said than done.

Yeah I know I’ve been slack on the blog, but I’m going to get back into it by making a bold statement that is admittedly out of my league. I’m also going to tell the story the long way, for the real juicy part – click here.

As I’ve recently moved to Sydney – I had the joy of setting up a new bank account. I did my research and weighed up pricing and features to see pretty much the same product. I got sold on the brand. NAB painted me a pretty picture of themselves, using bright colours and smiley face rainbows – they had me falling in love. Being new to the country, I hadn’t been exposed to the old “National Australia Bank” brand which is still used in ads along the train line to the airport for some terrible reason. If they still had this logo, I wouldn’t have lusted after them.

They’ve done a great job of making their brand appealing, but as soon as I had to deal with them, I was disappointed. Happy go lucky turned into old time processes that got in the way of pleasing me. I won’t go into the details – but it’s been two weeks and I still don’t have an EFTPOS card and wasn’t allowed to take cash out of the account for the first few days.

So here’s the obvious point: why did they rebrand to appeal to someone like me when they probably know that they can’t live up to that promise? 

Sure they need their processes to make the business operate, but making it seem like I’m going to enjoy it being their customer just makes them look worse and accentuates the pitfalls.

I previously dealt with a client who threw around the strap line ‘Making life easier’ like there was no tomorrow. The thing was, they didn’t make life easier at all. Their old way of thinking and processes made it bloody difficult for their customers. This company needs applauding though – their marketing team had the balls to strip the tag line from the brand because they couldn’t live up to it.

Marketers get too carried away with the warm and fuzzy. There was a time (or so I’m told) where consumers would buy whatever was advertised. Marketers had the power, now consumers have the power. We can see through the fuzzy. This is why it’s most important to get the product and service right, first and foremost.

If Yahoo! advertised and got warm and fuzzy on you, would it take you away from Google?

Bounce rate will impact your search rankings. We can never be certain about how search engines rank pages – but here’s my logic on this…

The problem with most SEO’s is that they are focussed on getting rankings. Sometimes the easiest way to get rankings is using ‘techniques’. More and more often though I see search results rankings that can not be explained by SEO techniques. Inbound links, title tags and good quality content are of course important, but certainly not the be all and end all.

Let’s take a step back here.

What is the point of a search engine?
To help a person find the information they are looking for.

So, when a user types something in they want to find something related to what they typed in.

What is the point of a search engine ranking sites?
To help a person find the best possible information for what they are looking for.

So logically the order of search results should show the best site, with the best content, and the most relevant to a persons search words.

OK, that’s obvious – what’s my point?
The best site has content that the person wants and is easy for them to get.

The trouble is that Google is not a person. It’s pretty close, but at the end of the day it’s an algorithm. It needs to a way to logically determine which site is best.

To measure this best factor Google is going to use a bunch of things to determine a web pages score. User experience is of course a huge factor if a human was going to score a website. Google can’t tell a good design, or if something is interactive and capitvating for people viewing. What they can measure though, is the bounce rate* of a site.

It’s a dead give away to search engines that your site didn’t match the users expectations, why else would they be leaving.

My advice is to always think about users first and search engines should be kept happy naturally.

*Bounce rate refers to the percentage of visitors to your site who leave after seeing just one page. For example, 100 people visit your homepage, and 25 of them decide to leave without viewing any other pages. This would mean you have a bounce rate of 25%