June 7, 2010

Brian Solis

Filed under: People — Tags: , — admin @ 1:52 pm

Brian Solis is recognized as one of the most prominent thought leaders and published authors in social media. A digital analyst, sociologist, and futurist, Solis has influenced the effects of emerging media on the convergence of marketing, communications, and publishing. He is principal of FutureWorks, an award-winning New Media agency in Silicon Valley, and has led interactive and social programs for Fortune 500 companies, notable celebrities, and Web 2.0 startups. Brian Solis’ blog  is among the world’s leading business and marketing online resources.

Solis actively contributes his thoughts and experiences through keynote speaking appearances, books, articles and essays as a way of helping the marketing industry understand and embrace the new dynamics fueling new communications, marketing, and content creation. His blog, BrianSolis.com, is among the top 1.5% of all blogs tracked by Technorati and is ranked as one of the leading voices in the Ad Age Power 150 index of worldwide marketing bloggers. Solis also runs bub.blicio.us and contributes to TechCrunch, BrandWeek, and WebProNews.

Brian Solis along with co-author Deirdre Breakenridge released “Putting the Public back in Public Relations” in 2009. Published by Financial Times Press, the book has become a best seller and is highly regarded a must read by anyone in marketing, communications, and also journalism. In concert with Geoff Livingston, Solis released “Now is Gone” in 2007, an early, award-winning book that helps businesses learn how to engage in Social Media. He has also written several ebooks on the subjects of Social Media, New PR, Customer Service, and Blogger Relations. His forewords are also featured in PR 2.0 by Deirdre Breakenridge, published by FT Press and MySpace Marketing by Sean Percival, published by Que, and Twittfaced: Your Tookit for Understanding and Maximizing Social Media by Jacob Morgan. Solis’ latest book is Engage: The Complete Guide for Brands and Businesses to Build, Cultivate, and Measure Success in the New Web, published by John Wiley & Sons. Previous books include Now is Gone with Geoff Livingston and Putting the Public Back in Public Relations: How Social Media is Reinventing the Aging Business of PR.

Peter Morville

Filed under: People — Tags: , , — admin @ 8:34 am

Peter Morville is a writer, speaker, and consultant. He is best known as a founder of the field of information architecture. He advises such clients as AT&T, Harvard, IBM, the Library of Congress, Microsoft, the National Cancer Institute, Vodafone, and the Weather Channel. His work on experience strategy and the future of search has been covered by Business Week, The Economist, Fortune, NPR, and The Wall Street Journal.

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June 4, 2010

Cross-browser testing

Filed under: research — Tags: , , , , , , , — admin @ 2:25 pm

Websites are viewed with different browsers on different operating system. These browser/OS  combinations should all deal with HTML, CSS and JavaScript in the same way. Unfortunately they do not. That is why every website owner should test if his site works and renders properly in at least the most common browser/OS combinations. In the Google Analytics screen dumps below, you can see that Microsoft Internet Explorer (IE), Mozilla Firefox, Apple Safari, Google Chrome and  Opera are the most common browsers. Depending on the time and budget available you can test on all or just a few browser/OS combo’s. Do not forget that of all browsers there are several versions available. As most browsers offer a semi automatic update you will find that most people use one of the latest versions available.

For proper testing I prefer to testing machines available of which I know exactly what is and what is not installed on it. Depending on the fonts that are installed and if ClearType (Windows only) switched on or of a site can look very different. There are a number of browser plugins that are not installed by default in most browsers like Java, Flash or SilverLight. To do a proper test on a website that uses these techniques you need machines where these plugins are not installed to see what is left of your site.  It can even be usefull to test a website with default functionality like JavaScript or CSS switched of. But for most test where you just want to know if your HTML, CSS and JavaScript will act and look like you intended, the browser plug-in available from spoon.net is a great solution. They offer a true cloud computing solution where you can run applications (including the most common browsers) on one of their servers and view the screen  get it pushed to your pc.  It is like Microsoft’s Remote Desktop or Citrix.

If you do not have the resources to get a testing room furnished with at least 10 computers  http://www.spoon.net/Browsers is the best alternative!

For people who just want to see screenshots of their site in different browsers for a cross-browser test, there are several multi-browser screenshot services available. Smashingmagazine.com tested most multi-browser screenshot services and wrote a in depth report about it. The table below is the outcome of their test.

Browsers supported Price (1 year)
BrowserShots IE, Firefox, Chrome, Opera, Safari, Dilo, SeaMonkey, Minefield, Epiphany, Flock, Galeon, Konqueror, K-Meleon, Avant, Netscape, Shireteko, Kazehakase, Iceweasel Free
BrowserCam IE, Firefox, Chrome, Opera, Safari, Konqueror, Camino, Netscape, AOL $999.95
BrowserLab IE, Firefox, Chrome and Safari Free (till end of 2010)
SuperPreview IE, Firefox and Safari $149
BrowserSeal IE, Firefox, Chrome, Opera and Safari $49
Litmus IE, Firefox, Chrome, Opera, Safari, Flock, Camino, SeaMonkey, Netscape $588
Multi Browser Viewer IE, Firefox, Chrome, Opera, Safari, Flock, SeaMonkey, Netscape, K-Meleon, Camino, Konqueror, Epiphany, Kazehakase $129.95
Browsera IE, Firefox, Safari $588

Search API’s: Yahoo, Goolge & Bing

Filed under: research — Tags: , , , , — admin @ 11:35 am

The 3 major search engines all offer the possibility to use their search technology in your on-line application. You can offer Google, Bing and/or Yahoo search results to your visitors on your site in your own layout and filters. The most common use is probably of Search APIs is probably website owners offering site search to their visitors. Joomla, WordPress, Drupal and most other CMSs come with build in site search, but for larger websites this produces irrelevant results. The top search companies are just better in sorting by relevance. If you have a relatively large website and relevance in site search is important to you the Yahoo, Goolge or Bing Search API can help you greatly. For all three you need to register for a API key. It is free to get a key, but there are restrictions on the amount of searches you may preform.

These are the URLs you can use to register for an API key.

Documentation can be found here

Google & Microsoft also offers  paid services under the names Search Solutions for business & SharePoint 2010 Search.
Next to that Google also offer Custom Search which allows only very minor adjustments in layout, but a lot af filter options. The fact that you can not remove the ads from the SERPs is compensated by the fact that you can make some money from them with your AdSense account.

June 2, 2010

How to make an ‘advanced segment’ in Google Analytics for long tail organic traffic?

Filed under: research — Tags: , , , , , , , , — admin @ 11:49 am

How to find out if  “Google MayDay” affected your rankings?

There have been some algorithmic changes to Google Search the around the 1st of May, hence the name ‘Google MayDay’. These changes could have effected your long tail positions in Google. Matt Cutts reacts to questions about Google MayDay in the video below. If you run Google analytics on your website the easiest way to find out if the changes affected the ranking of your site is to create a ‘advanced segment’. With advanced segments you could make analytics display only data for traffic generated by long tail search phrases (ie. search phrases containing 4 or more words).

How to make an ‘advanced segment’ for long tail organic results?

  1. Log in to your google analytics account
  2. If you have multiple websites configured select the website profile you want to work with
  3. In the left menu choose ‘Advanced segments’ under ‘My customizations’
  4. Click  ‘+  Create new custom segment’ in the top right corner of the content area
  5. Add the ‘dimension’ ‘Medium’ from ‘Traffic Sources’ by dragging it from the left menu. (see: figure 1)
  6. Set the condition to: ‘matches exactly’ ‘organic’ to make sure only organic search results will show up
  7. Add “and” statement
  8. In the  and statement add the ‘dimension’ ‘Keyword’ from ‘Traffic Sources’ by dragging it from the left menu.
  9. Set the ‘condition’ to ‘matches regular expression’
  10. Set the ‘value’ to: ^([a-z]+)([\s+]+)([a-z]+)([\s+]+)([a-z]+)([\s+]+)([a-z]+) This regular expression will match strings that start with 4 words (containing only chatracters a to z) which are seperated by one or more spaces (which can also be a + sign).
  11. Give the segment a name in the field indicated with ‘name segment’ and save it. (Your screen should now look like figure 2)
  12. To start using the segment go to the dashboard and click ‘Advanced Segments: All Visits’ in the top right corner of the content area. Check the new segment and uncheck ‘all visits’ and apply the changes. (see: figure 3)
  13. You are now ready to view your stats with only long tail data.

further reading:

Add “and” statement

June 1, 2010

Blogvertising

Filed under: research — Tags: , , — admin @ 3:01 pm

There are many ways in which advertising is offered on blogs. Buying a Pay per Click (PPC) or Pay per View (PPV) campaign is something that can be done on any website including blogs. Paying a blogger to write post about your brand or product can only be done on a blog. The paid review or advertorial which is paid per post is the only form of advertising that truly is blogvertising. There are many platforms that help advertisers to find bloggers.

Some of the most popular of these pay per post platforms according to Google trends:blogvertising platforms popularity according to google trends

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May 21, 2010

Website feedback tools

Filed under: research — admin @ 9:44 am

If you want to know what the visitors of your site think of your site you have a few options. You could ask visitors you know personally for their opinion. You could publish an email address where they could send their comments. You could have a response form build that that send the comments to a database or email address. These methods might give you some insight into the user experience of your website, but there are some free tools out there that will provide you with much more in depth analysis of your visitors’ comments. Why re-invent the wheel if it is freely available?

Some of the most popular website feedback tools according to Google Trends

website feedback tools

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May 18, 2010

Hosted website toolbars

Filed under: research — Tags: , , , , , , , — admin @ 10:53 am

May 15, 2010

Michael Gray

Filed under: People — admin @ 11:41 pm

Michael GrayMichael Gray became involved in web development and website management in 1998. He was Webmaster for a major specialty retailer, helping create their website presence and growing their online sales from less than $10,000 a month to over $25 million in annual web sales. Michael has been involved with affiliate marketing campaigns for several years and does consulting work on a variety of topics such as SEO, Social Media and Blog Management. Michael has been a speaker at SMX, Search Engine Strategies and PubCon He is moderator at Webmaster World and Sphinn and an editor at ThreadWatch.
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Corey Perlman

Filed under: People — admin @ 9:46 pm

Corey PerlmanCorey Perlman is the President of eBoot Camp, Inc., an education company that provides people with the knowledge and skills to effectively market their business on the Web. Through interactive books, seminars and workshops, Corey quickly transforms business owners, entrepreneurs and company employees into Internet marketing “propeller-heads!” Since 2005, Corey has conducted over 200 eBoot Camp workshops and seminars to public audiences as well as small and mid size companies all over the world. (more…)

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