You know that big windup jack-in-the-box of loud political debates? Let’s you and I put it aside for a while.

And please, I beg thee, take your own political goggles off for a few minutes and join me as I take you on a tour of online marketing done well. The fact that we’re talking about a marketing effort headed by a politician running for the highest office is incidental.

Regardless of where you stand politically, even the most jaded pundit admits…

...continue to read "Obama: The Online Persuasion Architect in Action"

It had all the makings of powerful viral campaign.

It started as a Tweet:

Who wants a FREE $50 gift code? Here it is: TLTW7897 First come, first serve – and all tees are ON SALE FOR $12!! http://tinyurl.com/yqe9f

Bryan Eisenberg (@TheGrok) caught it among the noise that is twitter traffic, then predictably, he forwarded it to me and the rest of the staff. 50$ bucks off t-shirts at Threadless.com, very cool.

So like any wearer of T-shirts I followed the link and was…

...continue to read "Threadless left me Shirtless"

Sometimes when you’re trying to get all the hard stuff right, you forget the easy stuff.  Then your buddies mock you.

Hard:  Write another book.

Easy:  Tell people where they can get a free sample chapter.

Idiot:  Skip the Easy part.

With all the hoopla surrounding the release of our latest book, “Always Be Testing“, both Bryan and I forgot to let you know we’ve a sample chapter available online as a PDF.  Enjoy.

So busy was I trying not to…

...continue to read "When Is “Always Be Testing” Like A Banana Peel?"

Join Dr. Ralph Wilson, Jim Sterne and I, as we explain in this 7 minute video what “continuous incremental improvement” means and how to get started with it.

What obstacles do you face in getting your organization to adopt a continuous optimization process? Do they need to see more success stories like these?

Editors Note: If you want to learn more about marketing optimization and meet Ralph, Jim and Bryan, register for the eMetrics Marketing Optimization Summit in Washington DC, October 20-23rd.…

...continue to read "What is Continuous Improvement?"

In “The Best Practices In Social Media Marketing Writing Project”, my good friend, Mitch Joel examines the issue of best practices in Social Media Marketing.  His best practice recommendation?  Consistency.

Consistency. Be consistent. In everything that you do. (The article link above will take you to Mitch’s specifics.)

Mitch is collecting best-practice ideas from folks in the industry.  He happened to tag me.

So here’s my take on what companies involved in Social Media Marketing should be considering.

In the recent…

...continue to read "Before Consistency in Social Media Marketing"

The best marketing to women experts will tell you that marketing to “women” as a generalized category is usually less than ideal. It’s not about marketing to women, it’s about the female customer, and about seeing her real. And that means NOT marketing to a stereotype, which is something that I couldn’t agree with more.

But then where does that leave broad-based gender differences and reality-based demographic information?  For instance, women make or influence 85% of all consumer purchasing decisions and control the…

...continue to read "Is the New Mint.com Marketing to Women Through Design?"

Does your organization or company have a gag reflex when it comes to testing? Never mind the medicine to fix a problem, are they even prepared to acknowledge that the problem exists?

Ronny Kohavi from Microsoft’s Experimentation Platform had a short post the other day about Dr. Ignác Semmelweis (pronounced “Eeg-natz Shem-mel-vise”, those darn Hungarians!), a 19th century doctor, whose observations (and subsequent testing) of what only a generation later would be understood as cross-patient germ infection, reduced mortality 10-fold when applied.…

...continue to read "Does Your Testing Organization Have A Gag Reflex?"

As part of the research for our latest book, Always Be Testing, we spent some time chatting with several people about testing and how testing lives in their corporate culture. This is one of my favorite interviews from the series. Take some time to listen to my interview with Bernardo de Albergaria, VP & GM of eCommerce, Citirix Online. He is responsible for selling products and the online experience for products like Gotomeeting and GotoMyPC.

Click here to listen to Bryan…

...continue to read "Podcast Interview: Bernardo de Albergaria, VP of eCommerce, Citrix"

If you’re highly optimized website ranked at or near the top for your primary key words/phrases, would you be interested in advertising (via PPC) on those same keywords?

Sounds like a crazy question, right? I mean why would you bother paying for a click that would have come to you anyway?

Well, according to this Microsoft adCenter follow up blog post to the SES San Jose conference, showing up in both organic AND paid results can highten your prospect’s intent to buy…

...continue to read "Would You Buy the Cow?"

Please join us this Wednesday, the 27th of August at 12pm EST, for our next installment of the Always Be Testing Webinar series. Bryan Eisenberg (my kid brother) , co-founder of FutureNow will be presenting along with Tom Leung, Product Manager for Google Website Optimizer.

During this session they’ll discuss optimizing headlines and calls to action and illustrate how to use these principles as they look at several case studies as well. Can’t make it at that time? If you register then you…

...continue to read "Always Be Testing Webinar This Wednesday: Final Reminder"