Steve Rubel’s post on “Why We’re Like a Miliion Monkeys on Treadmills” made me smile. Bryan and I are also way too often asked questions about how to create a Facebook, blogging or Web 2.0 strategy. Our answer is similar to Rubel’s:

Surely, channels are where the action is at. However, it’s important to remember they are just that – and they change. Circa 1998, perhaps when many of you were 10, The Globe.com, GeoCities and Tripod were all the rage.…

...continue to read "Monkeying Around With Web 2.0 Strategy"

In Part 2 of the interview — here’s Part 1 if you missed it — David Meerman Scott, author of The New Rules of Marketing & PR, speaks with Robert Gorell about how marketing and public relations needs to be a real interaction with not only your customers, but the people who move your industry. Real thought leadership doesn’t happen in a vacuum and, especially today, it’s important for your organization to tell its story–far beyond boring people with never-ending talk…

...continue to read "Grokcast: David Meerman Scott on Turning PR into Thought Leadership (Part 2)"

...continue to read "What Makes People Buy"

...continue to read "Why It’s Important to Love Your Customers"

Once you click, it shows you a bunch of options all of these related to their cell phones and not one that would help you sort wireless cards (they could have had things like PC or Mac, connection speeds, external or internal antenna, etc.) Okay, time to close that because that won’t help any. Verizon hasn’t gone through the effort to answer the 3rd question of the Persuasion Architecture process (see questions above). What information do I need to be…

...continue to read "Does Verizon Pay People To Lie?"

Okay… So, the methodical types have called me out on my last post. While I explained the “Piss-Off Factor,” I didn’t explain how to measure it. Although “measure” was indeed in the title, I didn’t mean it in the web analytics sense; rather, I was hoping to get people thinking about the customer experience as a whole. More to the point, that what we can’t measure is sometimes more important than what we can.

For instance, my example that although a “live chat”…

...continue to read "Measuring the “Piss-Off Factor” — Part II"

“It was like this sales woman was following me all over the store. I told her I didn’t want any help, but she didn’t listen to me,” commented my co-worker John Q. “She was always right on me, constantly looking over my shoulder. I half expected her to come into the dressing room and help me into my underwear!”

Wow… creepy.

Sound bizarre? It’s a real experience, though in the virtual world. John was shopping online at an ecommerce site and was…

...continue to read "Measuring the “Piss-Off Factor”"

Sliding, expanding, unfolding, cascading, fancy-pants hovering, animated navigational elements on web sites are the programming equivalent of pencil-twirling. Some people might say it’s cool, until they actually have to find something on the site. Then it’s just annoying and distracting.

I have an old friend who is a twirler. Mostly pencils, but I’ve seen him twirl knives, forks, plates, food, even sofa cushions. He’s the kind of guy who would walk across a college campus twirling a textbook on his knuckles.…

...continue to read "Fancy-Pants Navigation and Pencil Twirling"

Danny Sullivan points out:

There’s been a bit of a panic among some SEOs that the ramp up of Google Personalized Search Results last month will mean the end of SEO. But aside from the impact personalized search will have on SEO, personalized search also impacts link building related activities. Some of that impact is major…These types of links also have a better chance of being seen by humans that care [emphasis mine] about that content, and by extension, more likely to be…

...continue to read "The Secret SEO Dreads!"

Last week, I had bad luck getting my emails returned. The switch from PC to Mac hasn’t exactly been as seamless as advertised (to be fair, though, most issues still revolve around, of course, Microsoft). Entourage is branding all my outgoing emails as coming from “An Office for Mac Test Drive User” while I wait for the new licenses to arrive. Thanks, Bill.

As if this weren’t bad enough, now I’m having trouble getting internal messages answered! My account is linked…

...continue to read "Viagra, Salesforce, and the Power of Consumers"