Marketing Consulting Blog

Very interesting read over at Logic+Emotion

Copied from Guy's Blog

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By GuyKawasaki

Here’s a compilation of silly and stupid ways companies are hindering adoption of their products and services. I must admit, some of the companies that I’ve invested in have made these mistakes—in fact, that’s why I know these mistakes are (a) silly; (b) stupid; and (c) hinder adoption.

1. Enforced immediate registration. Requiring a new user to register and provide a modicum of information is a reasonable request—I just think you should do it after you’ve sucked the person in. Most sites require that registration is the first step, and this puts a barrier in front of adoption. At the very least, companies could ask for name and email address but not require it until a later time.

   A good example of a site that does the right thing is Netvibes. It allows you to do a high level of customization without registering. (Thanks to Glenn Kelman)

2. The long URL. When you want to send people an URL the site generates an URL that’s seventy characters long—or more! When you copy, paste, and email this URL, a line break is added, so people cannot click on it to go to the intended location.

   Here’s an URL for a billiard table copied and pasted from the CostCo site. Just how many billiard-table models could CostCo be selling?

   http://www.costco.com/Browse/Product.aspx?Prodid=11197553&search=billiard%20table&Sp=S&Mo=8&cm_re=1-_-Top_Left_Nav-_-Top_search&Nr=P_CatalogName:BC&Ns=P_Price|1||P_SignDesc1&N=0&whse=BC&Dx=mode+matchallpartial&Ntk=All&Dr=P_CatalogName:BC&Ne=4000000&D=billiard%20table&Ntt=billiard%20table&No=0&Ntx=mode+matchallpartial&Nty=1&topnav=&s=1

   The justification often goes like this: “We create a long URL because people with Crays might break our code and see private pages. Seventy characters that can be twenty-six lower case letters, twenty-six upper case letters, or ten numbers ensures that no one can break our code since the possible combinations outnumber the quantity of atoms in the universe.” This is what keeps sites like TinyUrl and SnipURL in business.

   Also, speaking of URLs, it’s good to have an easy naming convention for URLs. MySpace, for example, creates easy-to-remember URLs like http://www.myspace.com/guykawasaki.

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Test: Can people communicate your site’s URLs to others over the phone?

Extra credit: People using Verizon and can do this despite its coverage.

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3. Windows that don’t generate URLs. Have you ever wanted to point people to a page, but the page has no URL? You’ve got a window open that you want to tell someone about, but you’d have to write an essay to explain how to get that window open again. Did someone at the company decide that it didn’t want referrals, links, and additional traffic? This is the best argument I can think of for not using frames.

4. The unsearchable web site. Some sites that don’t allow people to search. This is okay for simple sites where a site map suffices, but that’s seldom the case. If your site has a site map that goes deeper than one level, it probably needs a search box.

5. Sites without Digg, del.icio.us, and Fark bookmarks. There’s no logic that I can think of why a company would not want its fans to bookmark its pages. And yet many companies don’t make this possible. When my blog hits the front page of Digg, page views typically increase by a factor of six or seven times. It’s true that the Digg effect wears off quickly, but some new readers stick around and that’s a good thing.

6. Limiting contact to email. Don’t get me wrong: I love email. I live and die by email, but there are times I want to call the company. Or maybe even snail mail something to it. I’ve found many companies only allow you to send an email via a web form in the “Contact Us” page. Why don’t companies call this page “Don’t Contact Us” and at least be honest?

7. Lack of feeds and email lists. When people are interested in your company, they will want to receive information about your products and services. This should be as easy as possible—meaning that you provide both email and RSS feeds for content and PR newsletters.

8. Requirement to re-type email addresses. How about the patent-pending, curve-jumping, VC-funded Web 2.0 company that wants to you to share content but requires you to re-type the email addresses of your friends?

   I have 7,703 email addresses in Entourage. I am not going to re-type them into the piece-of-shiitake, done-as-an-afterthought address book that companies build into their products. If nothing else, companies can use this cool tool from Plaxo or allow text imports into the aforementioned crappy address book. When do you suppose a standard format will emerge for transferring contacts?

9. User names cannot contain the “@” character. In other words, a user name cannot be your email address. I am a member of hundreds of sites. I can’t remember if my user name is kawasaki, gkawasaki, guykawasaki, or kawasaki3487. I do know what my email address is, so just let me use that as my user name.

10. Case sensitive user names and passwords. I know: user names and passwords that are case sensitive are more secure, but I’m more likely to type in my user name and password incorrectly. One of the funniest moments of a demo is when a company’s CEO can’t sign into her own account because she didn’t put in the proper case of her user name or password. I’ve seen it happen.

11. Friction-full commenting. “Moderated comments” is an oxymoron. If your company is trying to be a hip, myth-busting, hypocrisy-outing joint, then it should let anyone comment. Here’s an example of one such policy:

    Q. Who can leave comments on GullyHag

    A. Anyone who has been invited, either by us or by a friend. The invite system works like Gmail. We’ve invited a bunch of our favorite execs, bloggers, and friends to comment, then given them invitations to share with their friends and colleagues. That way, the burden of inclusion, and exclusion, is shared.

    The concept that people have to be invited to post comments is pathetic—if you hold yourself out as a big cojones company, then act like it. Even the concept that one has to register to post a comment is lousy. There have been many times that I started to leave a comment on a blog but stopped when I realized that I’d have to register.



12. Unreadable confirmation codes. Don’t get me wrong: I don’t support spam or robots creating accounts. A visual confirmation graphic system is a good thing, but many are too difficult to read. For example, this is what I got when trying to create a Yahoo! account. Is that an uppercase “X”? Is the last character an “s,” “5,” or “S”? Maybe this only affects old people like me, but it seems that all one merely has to prove is that you’re not a robot so a little bit of fuzziness should be good enough. For example, if the code is “ghj1lK” and someone who enters “ghj11K” is close enough.

13. Emails without signatures. There have been many times that I wanted to immediately call the sender or send him something, but there’s no signature. Also, when I book an appointment with a person, I like to put in his contact information in case I need to change it. Communication would be so much easier if everyone put a complete signature in their email that contains their name, company, address, phone, and email address.

    On a corporate level, communication would be so much easier if companies stop sending emails with a warning not to respond because the sender’s address is not monitored. I don’t mean they should not include the warning. I mean they should monitor the address.

14. Supporting only Windows Internet Explorer. Actually, I’m not nearly as vehement about this as you might think. Supporting Macintosh, Safari, and other Windows browsers is a lot of work, so this is your call. If you define your market as only the people who use Windows Internet Explorer, so be it. You may have to really invest some effort into this one, but all the other items in this list are stupidly simple.

Excellent post by Logic+Emotion (Dave Armano):
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By darmano on Social Interactivity

I keep thinking about the "blogging killing planning" discussion. It made me think about how much I've reaped creatively from "blogsourcing" (which I've done a lot of over the past year). But I'm curious—has anyone out there who is either writing or even reading blogs feel that it has impacted their area of expertise in a negative way? If so—why?

Or on the flip side, why do you feel blogs (or blogging) makes what you do better? We all got along fine before the existence of social media, (at least the digital kind) so how is it making what we do better or worse?

By Brian White on Youtube

Filed under: Rumors, Products and services, Management, Consumer experience, Internet, Google (GOOG)

It was bound to happen -- Big Media wants to know who is uploading copyrighted material to YouTube, now owned by Google, Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOG). Short of raking out lawsuits in expedient fashion, 20th Century Fox has served YouTube a subpoena as of yesterday. It wants to find out who uploaded copies of entire recent episodes of "24" and "The Simpsons." Those are two of the largest-audience shows for Fox -- so understandably, the company is a tad miffed.

I have news for them -- although YouTube's presence has expanded into the limelight in the last year -- capped by extensive media coverage when Google bought the company in exchange for some of its stock -- there have been entire episodes of all kinds of copyrighted television shows on YouTube since its inception. There are constant "we are policing our site" comments from YouTube and now from Google, but freeloaders of content and violators of copyrights will *always* find a way to make tons o' content available to anyone with a 'net connection. Say it with me here -- BitTorrent.

Will media companies that produce mostly video content start barking like wild dogs in a similar fashion to the music industry (RIAA) that has sued its own customers and has taken down file-sharing networks due to massive copyright abuse? If so, the first few fertile steps are being laid now, since YouTube requires just a web browser (no file-sharing software or network knowledge needed).

The MPAA has been following in the RIAA's footsteps in trying to crack down on users posting copyrighted content online for all to see (and hear). In this Fox example, the damage "could be" worse. Why? Well, the "24" episodes in question actually appeared on YouTube before their prime time premiere on January 14. When copyright material starts making it to YouTube before it officially airs, we have issues -- and some network execs have tissues.

Found on the Business 2.0 Blog:

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By Erick Schonfeld on Online (including Search)

I just wanted to drop you a note outlining some ways I’ve been utilizing to expand my LinkedIn network. This tool is very powerful if you invest a little time into it, and I would imagine it has massive potential to help you in your career or business. Having a vast network of contacts never hurts regardless of how successful you are at this moment.

Here’s the power of networking based on my own experience using this tool thus far:

I joined LinkedIn last Thursday (1/4/2007). Since then my network looks like this:

That’s a lot of potential reach in less than one week! I only wish I had discovered this tool when I was in sales. Oh well, better late than never right?

So, how would one go about expanding their network and reach rather quickly?

1. Visit http://www.toplinked.com and browse over some of the top linked folks. If you see some that mesh well with your goals and objectives, send them an invitation or direct e-mail to join your network. Most people will do this if you ask politely.
2. Browse over the LinkedIn answers section to see if there are people looking to expand their network and e-mail those which reply. A good example: http://www.linkedin.com/answers?viewQuestion=&questionID=7320&askerID=4140858&browseIdx=9&sik=1168456487935&goback=%2Eabq_o_n_*2
3. Consider adding a link to your profile via your e-mail signature. LinkedIn can provide you a nice signature box with a lot of contact information to include in your outgoing e-mails. Go to My Profile --> E-mail signatures to set one up.
4. Promote your profile on your blog or website.
5. Ask a public question on LinkedIn under the answers tab and include in the question your e-mail address so people can expand their network if they’re interested. Or post a public invitation, including your e-mail address, asking for others to share theirs much like step #2.
6. Include your e-mail address in your profile on LinkedIn. That way people actively searching for networking prospects can connect directly with you.
7. When you post a comment or reply on message boards, blogs, or user groups, include a link to your profile. Or link back to your website or blog (this is a common search engine optimization trick).
8. Lastly, be easy to access! If you want to be able to connect to a lot of people, now or in the future, think like those people would think and make it easy for them to connect with you. That’s networking 101, but it still applies.

There are some people that do not wish to expand their network because of their current job situation or fear of the Internet. I understand. Yes, it is a risk to post your public e-mail address out there because of spam and whatnot, but I haven’t run into that being an issue thus far, and the various e-mail clients are getting better and better at stripping bogus e-mails out. My contact information is readily available on my business website, blog, outgoing e-mails, and on LinkedIn. I’m not hard to find if someone is really trying. Does that scare me? A little, but I figure if I’m going to be very successful in my business, there are trade-offs and risks involved that I just have to take. Since LinkedIn is free to use, why not take full advantage of it? It’s a great tool that can really improve one’s chances at success if utilized properly.

Anyway, I hope this helps, and I hope you choose to expand your network and connect with some really interesting people out there.

If I can help you in any way, please don’t hesitate to ask.