Posts Tagged ‘Google’

Every day around 3pm, I get my afternoon update of The Washington Post via e-mail.  Each update contains a summary of about a dozen stories and links to the full story on the Post Web site.  Every time I get an update from Facebook about a message from a friend or a comment on one of my updates, I get a URL to click on.

Have you ever noticed how long these Web addresses are?  Ever wonder why these URL are so long?

The answer is simple: tracking codes. Tracking codes are strings of text added to the end of a URL that let you track the source of a click.  For example, if your organization has an e-mail newsletter and you want to know how many people click on the links in your e-mails, you add tracking codes to the URLs.  Your usage tracking software will almost always treat the URLs with the tracking codes as unique from the same URLs without the tracking codes.  So, when looking at your usage reports, you can look at usage overall to specific pages and then figure out how much of the traffic came from the e-mail newsletter.

If you usage Google Analytics for usage tracking, Google has a terrific URL builder that create properly formatted tracking codes to track the source of clicks, specific campaigns, even the duration of your campaign.  Here’s an example of how it works:

Let’s take the URL to my recent blog post on magazine subscriptions on the iPad.  The URL looks like this if I navigate directly to it:

http://www.thematrixfiles.net/blog/am-i-really-going-to-pay-4-99-for-one-issue-of-time-magazine/

When my marketing team promotes this blog post e-mails, Twitter, Facebook, etc., we use the Google URL builder to add tracking codes.  Here’s a sample URL:

http://www.thematrixfiles.net/blog/am-i-really-going-to-pay-4-99-for-one-issue-of-time-magazine/?utm_source=Twitter&utm_medium=SM&utm_campaign=blog

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• Tags: e-mail, Google, marketing, Web site traffic

Why do restaurant owners love Flash so much that their entire Web sites are in Flash? Don’t get me wrong, I love Flash and I make a living selling Flash movies, branding areas, yada, yada. But most Web sites should not be all Flash!

Here’s an example of an all Flash site that is annoying and borderline useless. I was scheduling lunch with a friend, who asked me to recommend a restaurant and send him the physical and Web addresses. No problem, right? Wrong.

Check out the Web site for Kora in Crystal City - http://www.korarestaurant.com/ The Web site is pretty, but if you’re trying to get an address and send it to a friend, it’s not user-friendly at all!

• It took me 5 minutes to find the address.  It’s not on the home page, nor under Hours and Directions.  It’s under Contact Us and Reservations.
• Because the site is entirely in Flash, I couldn’t copy the address and paste into the e-mail I was sending my friend.
• I also could not copy and paste the address into Google maps so that I could send my friend directions from Reston.
• Forget being able to bookmark specific pages because the URL never changes in the single Flash file for the entire site. So I couldn’t send my friend the URL of a menu page.  Aaaargh.
• Oh yeah, you can’t print Flash pages either unless print-friendly pages have been specifically created; most designers don’t bother.  So if you want to print Kora’s Hours and Directions page, you’re out of luck.

Since I’m lazy and did not want to re-type the address, I simply went to Google, typed “Kora Arlington, VA” and got a link to a map and directions from Google maps.  God bless Google.

I’m sure Kora paid good money for its beautiful, all Flash site, but I bet it’s a pain to update and it’s not very accommodating for visitors who just want to copy and paste an address.  Good grief!

How about you?  Got your own rants against an all Flash site?  Post links and comments!

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• Tags: Google, marketing, Web Design

It’s the new year and it’s customary to look at the previous year and make predictions about the upcoming year or decade.  Every day in my e-mail inbox, I get a flood of Top Ten lists.  So where do I go when I need statistics about which Web browser is winning the browser war, how many users Twitter really has, or the gadgets and technologies that will likely shine in 2010?  Here are my favorite sites:

• The Pew Research Center has some of the best research about all kinds of trends shaping the US.  The Pew Internet and American Life Project has great information about technology adoption, Web 2.0, social media and the technology divide.
• Ad Age is one of my favorite sites.  The daily e-mail newsletter is one that I read nearly every day.  This article on Where Digital Marketing is Heading in 2010 is a must read.
• When I’m looking for numbers and visitors demographics for a particular Web site, I go to Quantcast.  For example, Quantcast estimates there are 23.3M Twitter users, of which 53% are female, 44% are between the ages of 18-34, and 75% are Caucasian.  The data can be a stale by a few months, which is a problem for fast-growing sites, but the data is usually pretty solid.
• Although I live in the DC area, I’m a huge New York Times fan.  Check out the 9th Annual Year in Ideas (the best!) and an awesome infographic that shows search terms related to cooking and Thanksgiving, by region of the country.

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• Tags: Browsers, Google, trends

Google is doing it again.  Google is turning the publishing world upside down with Google Books, currently in beta.  Google Books allows the public to download more than a million public domain books in PDF and EPUB formats.

Google has been quietly scanning the world’s books for inclusion into Google Books, which is both a search and a library.  Here’s how it works:

• Users like you and me and go to Google Books and use the Book Search, which functions just like a regular Google search.
  
• If the book is out of copyright, or the publisher has given Google permission, you’ll be able to see a preview of the book, and in some cases the entire text. If it’s in the public domain, you’re free to download a PDF copy.
• Books that are still in copyright can sometimes be previewed; you’ll also find links to sites where you can purchase or borrow the book.
• As long as you have a Google account, you can “add” books to your library for later viewing and downloading.
  

For example, Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain is in the public domain.  I can download a full copy of Huck Finn from Google Books. Read the rest of this entry

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• Tags: Google

We’ve been kicking around ideas for making the Matrix Group intranet better.  During a recent meeting, the Director of Software Engineering wondered if we should switch from our intranet calendar to the Google calendar. Whoa, I thought. Put my company calendar and personal schedule on Google? My mission-critical data that I would die without?  No way.

But then I got to thinking. Gmail is a seriously good e-mail service.  Google Analytics is so ridiculously good that yes, I would pay for it; in fact, I would pay lots of money for it (don’t get any ideas, Google.)  And before Google bought Postini, it was already a best of breed, commercial anti-spam service.

So I did a little more research on Google apps.  It turns out that the Google apps, terms and conditions I’m familiar with are for personal use.  But Google also markets its services to companies and schools.  Google offers the same services (Gmail, calendar, docs, Web site hosting, and Postini) to companies for a really low price ($50 per user, per year).  So why is the corporate version of Google Apps not free?  For the money, you get a 99.9% uptime reliability guarantee (for Premier Edition users), mobile device support, 25 GIG of storage, and the Google promise of security and compliance.  Phone support is supposedly also available, but I can’t find reference anywhere in the Terms of Service to back-up and retention of data. Read the rest of this entry

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• Tags: Google, Productivity

All day long, I sit in meetings where my staff, clients and I try to intuit what customers and members want.  We look at usage reports, search logs, customer feedback forms, guestbook entries, and survey results.  All of these sources give us insight into what customers do, seek and want.  But after conducting a focus group for a client this evening, I’m reminded that we need regular face time with our customers and we need to just ask them what they want.

Tonight’s focus group was amazing.  Nearly two dozen people gave up two hours of their day to discuss why they are members of an organization, what they like about the Web site, and what would make their jobs easier.   Some of the ideas were mind-blowingly simple, while others were flat out brilliant.  If half of the product ideas prove economically feasible, this organization has a product road map for the next year.

Speaking of product road maps, I am in the habit of calling a couple of customers after each release of our association management software, MatrixMaxx.  I call to check-in, get feedback on new features, and, most importantly, ask them for  the one thing they would like to see in a future release.  For the 9.1 release, the suggestions were all spot on, some were so easy to implement we wondered why we hadn’t done the work earlier, and some proved to be blockbusters.

But what do you do when you have zillions of customers and you get a flood of customer requests on a regular basis?  Google Moderator allows communities to post suggestions/questions and then vote on all ideas submitted.  President Obama used Google Moderator to accept questions for an electronic town hall meeting; citizens submitted and then ranked questions; the President answered the most popular questions. Read the rest of this entry

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• Tags: association management, Barack Obama, customer service, Google, software development

What do the iPhone, Facebook, Twitter and Google have in common?  They have great platforms that have contributed greatly to their success!  What’s a platform and why does it matter?

Wikipedia defines a platform as “a place to launch software. It is an agreement that the platform provider gave to the software developer that logic code will interpret consistently as long as the platform is running on top of other platforms.”

I’m convinced that Facebook zoomed past MySpace because it launched a developer platform earlier.  The developer-friendly platform lets developers create zillions of cool apps and suck more of our time, energy and loyalty.  How many quizzes have you filled out on Facebook?

The iPhone is no different.  Apple opened up its platform, hosted a user-friendly store and nine months later, iPhone users had downloaded 1 billion applications, most of them free or under $5.  My husband says he can purchase or download apps for his Blackberry but it’s not easy and the apps are on multiple sites.  No fun at all.

Twitter’s platform lets developers capture streams of data from the millions of tweets posted every day.  Born from these streams are apps that let us visualize tweets, manage tweets, search tweets, map tweets.
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• Tags: Facebook, Gadgets, Google, software development, Twitter

When I’m researching a product, I go to the Web. When I’m looking to hire a candidate, I go to the Web. All day long, I’m running searches in Google and other search engines. So it only stands to reason that customers, prospective customers and prospective staff are likely running Google searches on my company, Matrix Group. And when they do, what do they find?

Some call it ORM – Online Reputation Management – or the art of managing how you and your company are perceived online.  ORM starts with tracking mentions of your company on the Web, anywhere on the Web, in every nook and cranny.  So how do you that?  There are tools and services, but I like:

• Google Alerts.  Google lets you create e-mail alerts for keywords and phrases.  Every time Google indexes a new page with your keyword or phrase, you get an e-mail.
• Of course, you should also be checking how your company shows up in the main Google search and the Google blog search.
• Twitter search.  This is a real-time search of Twitter posts that Google doesn’t necessarily index and certainly not fast enough.  You can even create an RSS feed out of specific searches.

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• Tags: Google, marketing

Last week, I had the pleasure of attending a keynote session by Chris Sacca, former Head of Special Initiatives at Google, during the ASAE Technology Conference.  Boy was it fun to hear about what it’s like to work at Google, Google’s core values, the perks, and the future of search.  I was so inspired by Chris’ words that I decided to follow him on FriendFeed.  I’m relatively new to FriendFeed, but it feels like I’m stalking Chris Sacca. I can now follow this guy’s tracks as he views, posts, comments, and bookmarks across the Web.  Do I really want all this information about one person?  Even for me, this is starting to feel like TMI (too much information).

But first, let me tell you about Chris’ speech, which was terrific.  Among the things he talked about:

• What is Google’s secret sauce? Chris says that Google has become a powerhouse because they take really talented engineers, present them with really big problems, and then give them lots of computing power to solve those problems.
• The 20% Rule. Evidently, everyone at Google can allocate 20% of their time to whatever they want, so long as: they log their actiivities in the projects database and they present their work to their peers every few weeks.  If a project is deemed worthy, the responsible staff will be given more staff time and computers.
• You only get laughed at when your ideas are too small. Google leaders Eric Schmidt, Sergey Brin and Larry Page want all Google staff to think big and use their brains and computers to solve really big problems.
• The 150 feet rule. In addition to having over a dozen cafes on the Google campus, there are snacks every 150 feet to feed the body, feed the mind, and encourage socializing and networking.
• Search is going to get a whole lot better soon. Although the Google home page looks the same, the search technology behind it is getting better every day.  Google now tracks what we click on when we search; in the future, the search results for the same keywod may be different for you and me, based on our individual preferences and past history.
• Google Trends is not only cool, it’s surprising what we can learn from search patterns. Chris says that Google Trends can predict the box office success of a movie and where the flu will hit.

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• Tags: Blog, Google, social networking, Twitter

I had the pleasure of speaking at the ASAE Technology Conference, taking place until tomorrow at the DC Convention Center.  My topic? Dealing With Big Trends in a Small Staff Organization. Here are the 5 big trends I discussed:

1. Your Browser as the New Operating System. The Web browser is increasingly the platform for mission critical applications, like association management systems, intranets, document management systems and e-mail.
2. Conversation is King. We used to talk about creating a communications strategy.  Today, we need to create a conversation strategy because customers are interested in engagement, in two-way conversations.
3. Unified, Integrated Data. I call this the Amazon Effect.  Our customers expect us to know who they are, communicate with them in a personalized way, and give them personalized offerings.  We can’t do this unless we have a unified view of their activities and interactions.
4. Zen Tech Warrior. These warriors want information on specific topics, when they want it, on the device(s) of their choice.  Take me, for example.  I might want my magazine in print, news via e-mail, and alerts via text.  Can your database handle these preferences and can you execute on this information?
5. Green Computing. We all know that we need to do our part to reduce energy consumption and save the planet.  Data centers represent 1.5% of the electricity demand in the US.  Think green when you buy computers and peripherals.

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• Tags: association management, Blog, Browsers, Google, leadership, social networking, Twitter