“There are three basic approaches to conducting quick remote interface tests, whether you’re testing live websites, designs, wireframes, or prototypes. The approach you take will depend mostly on how you feel about people—do you want to talk to users face-to-face, or use one of the many new UX tools and let computers gather the information automatically?”

From A List Apart. Really practical and thorough with lots of links, funny (choose your usability test method based on whether or not you like talking to people), and mentions my favorite free screen sharing application, Adobe Acrobat ConnectNow, that works with any operating system, Macs included.

URLs

http://www.alistapart.com/articles/quick-and-dirty-remote-user-testing/
http://www.adobe.com/acom/connectnow/

CMO.com a few months ago, published a chart that describes the social media channels most used by businesses. According to research CMO.com and BazaarVoice did recently, CMOs Plan for Higher Social Media Measurability in 2010, 81% of Chief Marketing Officers (CMOs) plan to link their revenues to their social media efforts. Tracking ROI, whether dollars earned or simply business impact, is a big step forward for business use of social media.

While the CMO.com chart is interesting, and a good high level introduction, it’s missing Four Square, Yelp, and other location based social media that retailers can use to great effect. Retailers and local businesses have long found it difficult to get noticed and recommended online by their customers. LinkedIn works great for some businesses, and individuals, but not so well for your local flower shop. Four Square and similar services are perfect for the millions of these small local businesses.

If you’re interested in charts about social media, what social media is and how it operates, HubSpot has a great post, 22 Educational Social Media Diagrams. For example, the first chart groups social media outlets by type of activity, commenting versus creating content versus joining, a point of view that had not occurred to me. Plus at the bottom of their post is a link to PowerPoint and PDF versions of 50 more charts. Perfect for presentations to sell in social media projects.

URLs

http://www.cmo.com/social-media/cmos-guide-social-media-landscape
http://www.bazaarvoice.com/blog/2009/12/17/cmos-plan-for-higher-social-media-measurability-in-2010/
http://www.foursquare.com
http://www.yelp.com
http://blog.hubspot.com/blog/tabid/6307/bid/6005/22-Educational-Social-Media-Diagrams.aspx

“Many of us in this room have had our lives transformed by technology. Some of us have grown up with tech while others have embraced it as adults. Many of us have become enamored with tech and its transformative potential. And because of this, many of us have become technology advocates. We’ve worked our way into different institutions, preaching about new opportunities introduced because of the internet. Furthermore, many in this room have been active in transforming politics through technology. We’ve leveraged technology for fundraising and getting out the vote. We could go on and on about political events that have been shaped by technology, from the Obama Campaign to the post-election Iranian protests.

All of this is brilliant and powerful, exciting and motivating. But I’m also worried. I’m worried about the rhetoric we use when we talk about technology. Given what we’ve experienced and what we witness today, we tend to believe that these technologies are the great equalizers, that they can help ANYONE participate, that the technologies in and of themselves can revitalize democracy. In other words, we tend to believe in a certain utopian myth of the internet as the savior. What if this weren’t true?”

From “The Not-So-Hidden Politics of Class Online”, a presentation by danah boyd. Found through a NYTimes.com Blogwise item, Does Social Networking Breed Social Division?.

Both the presentation and the NYTimes.com post are important to read. However, the research points up something that should be rather obvious: people associate online with the same people they associate with offline. The class divisions in any society will be carried into the online world. Technology is neutral. If social equality is the goal, and I would sign up for that goal, perhaps technology needs to expand to make connections online that might be impossible in the real world.

These items also point up the flip side of some technology policies, for example, Facebook’s invitation only model. Building a service on invitation naturally reinforces the carryover of our offline social networks online. But it also makes it difficult to break out and identify and connect with people who share our interests but would not connect with offline. Facebook groups help break the walled garden dynamic. But you have to find a group, join, and then participate actively to make friends outside your real world friends.

Perhaps humans also should create technology that passively suggests connections based upon participation (e.g. key words in posts, group affiliations) and level of activity (e.g. suggesting only people who are active online). People could choose to not connect. But they also could choose to connect with confidence there was sufficient basis for connection based on interests.

What disturbed me were the disparaging comments about people who use the other service, in this case, MySpace, made by the teenagers boyd interviewed. While it is human to engage in us versus them thinking, teachers and parents should work to balance that way of thinking with the equally real notion that we live in a big world with lots of people who are very different from us, that we are indeed equal at the human level, that we should be open to others even if they are not like us or even disagree with what we think and do.

“How do you find a new search engine if all you know is Google? Typing “search engine” into the usual box might lead you to Microsoft’s newly launched Bing, the combined search at Dogpile, or the former king of search, Altavista.

But for those willing to dig around, searching for search engines can reveal a treasure trove: The net is rich with specialized search services, all trying to find a way to get their slice of the billions of dollars Google makes every year answering queries.

For this article, we surveyed some 50 specialty search services and picked out our favorites. What follows is not a systematic ranking or review, but a general guide to a very vibrant world that few have bothered to explore in depth.”

From Wired. There are a number of great engines to check out based on this article. Collecta looks useful for companies who want to find out what is said about them online while ParkingSpots can help you find a parking spot.

This article highlights the search trend away from generic search to topic specific search and action specific search. My guess is that some of these new search engines will be bought up by the bigger players like Google.

“If you’re a B2B marketer and you’re not using social technologies in your marketing, it means you’re late. We’ve seen a lot of excellent activity here from the likes of Dell and National Instruments (both won Forrester Groundswell awards) but a lot of the blogs, communities, and other social outreach from business to business companies is less than mature, to say the least. This is your chance to stand out. Take this report and show it to your boss to convince her that it’s time to get started.”

From the Groundswell blog at Forrester Research. While the topline is “Social Media isn’t just for teenagers,” it is striking how many business people currently read and participate in social media, from blogs to Facebook to Twitter, to connect with other businesses to do business. Social media has become mainstream.

“To its true believers at small businesses, it is a low-cost, high-return tool that can handle marketing and public relations, raise the company profile and build the brand.

That tool is blogging, though small businesses with blogs are still a distinct minority. A recent American Express survey found that only 5 percent of businesses with fewer than 100 employees have blogs. Other experts put the number slightly higher.”

From the New York Times (free registration required; stories available free for short time).  Part of this article is typical feel-good roundup. But it also highlights the key reasons smaller businesses should set up a blog, especially if one or more people in the company like to write. I slightly disagree with one of their sources who says companies with a product have less of a reason to blog. In fact, many people who use products are very interested in how a particular product is created, how it evolves, how it is maintained. More important, blogs allow customers and prospects to comment and engage the business. That’s always valuable.

“At first blush, one could conclude that site owners suffer from either arrogance or ignorance. Marketers either believe they don’t need analytics because they are smart enough to trust their gut (arrogance), or they don’t know what to do with them (ignorance). The Web analytics community has been split on this issue. Eric T. Peterson, Web analytics consultant, argues Web analytics is hard, while Google’s analytics evangelist Avinash Kaushik argues Web analytics isn’t hard. This still doesn’t sufficiently explain why more than 50 percent of marketing professionals fail to integrate analytics into their marketing efforts.”

From GrokDotCom. This is a really excellent discussion about the possible reasons businesses rely on instinct rather than hard data to make business decisions.

I believe it is culture: people start and run businesses based upon interacting directly with customers, in person and on the phone and by email. The quantitative skills required for optimization and testing typically are found in the accounting department and possibly a marketing research department. Most staffers don’t have an analytic background and so don’t necessarily think in terms of data and testing for marketing materials. They get that through customer contacts. The quantitative research function, if it exists at all, is part of business planning, not necessarily day to day marketing, which is what this article argues is needed.

From my client experience, aside from the cultural issues, the big problem is what to measure. I tell clients to start first with what they want to accomplish. It can be a small goal, for example, to get a site visitor to click on a button or signup for email. Or retweet their tweets. That tells you what to measure. And also to limit what you measure to one or two things to start. And to keep some sort of log file so you can measure results, recheck your assumptions and goals, and all the good stuff that comes from tracking your online marketing.

But this process does not have to be terribly complex. Indeed, complexity in measuring online marketing is the kiss of death. The best results come from incremental changes and optimization based on testing different ways to incent and motivate people to interact with your marketing.

Photo courtesy of Jon Clark’s Flickr stream.

“One major trend relates to the migration of marketing spend from high-cost channels like TV and print to low-cost channels like email that tend to be more cost effective in yielding the desired results and can also be more closely tracked and measured, which is imperative from a performance management perspective. In fact, Aberdeen research reveals that 60% of Best-in-Class companies have cut their previously allocated marketing spend in traditional media, 18% by more than half, while 47% of Best-in-Class companies, compared to 26% of Laggards, have increased their marketing spend on email marketing.”

From a Marketwire report posted on iStockAnalyst. Based on a press release about recent research from the Aberdeen Group. The Marketwire piece has more detail than the Aberdeen summary. If you want to figure out if any business is recession-proof, it looks like internet marketing will suffer less than traditional marketing, mostly because the cost structure is less and reach is potentially greater than, for example, direct mail. However, what works always depends on the needs of a particular business.

“Facebook has just updated their statistics page which now reports they have 175 million users. This means Facebook has increased its new user acquisition rate from 450,000 users a day to over 480,000 users a day. As Facebook expands, it continues to increase its growth rate suggesting that the company will easily surpass 300 million by the end of the year if everything goes well.”

From AllFacebook. Amazing fact: 41% of people in Iceland are on Facebook. So if you have a product geared towards Icelanders… Equally interesting is that the US penetration is only 14%. That argues for a lot of future growth. It’s also clear the service has become more a utility like the phone company and the internet itself. In fact, it may rival eBay in creating an online ecosystem that supports hundreds of thousands of businesses and jobs.

“I read a lot of blog posts and articles about “how” to use Twitter to productively market, promote, converse, or network. I read a lot about Twitter etiquette and about how to get followers, or provide value to followers, or be interesting there.

But I hear less about the “why”: Why use Twitter at all, when there are already so many other distractions to your workday, or your home life? Why bother talking to people you won’t ever meet, when you have real-world friends to keep up with? What kind of relationship can you hope to form on Twitter, anyway? Is there something wrong with you? Do you have ADD? Are you lonely, anti-social, weird? Or are you just needy?”

From Marketing Profs. Her four reasons are good for individuals and businesses. Plus the comments are equally interesting. Mostly this is a good case study for how businesses can use Twitter to gauge interest and value of their offerings.

“Australian scientists have reviewed a global pool of research into the effect of modern office design, concluding the switch to open-plan has led to lower productivity and higher worker stress.

“The evidence we found was absolutely shocking,” researcher Dr Vinesh Oommen from the Queensland University of Technology’s Institute of Health and Biomedical Innovation, said.

“In 90 per cent of the research, the outcome of working in an open-plan office was seen as negative, with open-plan offices causing high levels of stress, conflict, high blood pressure, and a high staff turnover.”

From News.com.au. But then we all know this based on experience, don’t we? The trick is to balance private and public spaces based on the activity.

“Here’s an interesting video showing how a paper prototype usability test helped the usability team at Corel find flaws in a preliminary design of a website creation product.”

From GUUUI.

While I’m a sucker for live and video tape of usability testing, this one may be self-indulgent given my work creating Red Wrangler. Corel seems locked in the classic paradigms of client side software. And ways of thinking about web page and web site publishing. These paradigms don’t work, unfortunately.

One solution is what we’ve done with Red Wrangler, breaking out the web site publishing problems into three parts: content, templates, and navigation links. The latter is sometimes dynamic, sometimes hard-coded in the templates. Typically templates are created by people who know HTML and CSS and we provide support to make it all work easily. Non-technical people typically work only with content using the WYSIWYG editor. When you do create a page, you link to that page either by updating the navigation links and/or linking from other pages. It’s not a perfect solution but it avoids the confusion you see in this video.

The only solution I’ve seen work that is similar to Corel’s is Google’s publishing product. You can drag and drop pages and the functionality is fairly intuitive. I believe, for example, that Google’s product updates any navigation links dynamically based on how you order pages.

However, like Corel, Google’s product thinks of web site and web page publishing as a silo. In fact, publishing web sites is part of a larger process. Red Wrangler is unique, so far, because we make it easy to corral in one place all the other related internet marketing activities that go with publishing a web site or a web page. For example, most business sites have a Contact Us page that generates leads and those leads must be gathered for follow-up and marketing with direct mail and email.

In any event, if you’re interested in watching paper prototyping, this is an interesting video.

URLs:

http://www.guuui.com/posting.php?id=2119

“Whether you are a Mac person or a PC person, even the briefest exposure to the Apple logo may make you behave more creatively, according to recent research from Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business and the University of Waterloo, Canada.”

As if Mac owners need more proof of their creative superiority, this report describes a test where people exposed to the Apple logo found more creative uses for a brick than people exposed to the IBM logo. Well, duh. From Science Daily. Found through a short but interesting status on the Apple logo in general and Steve Jobs’ fixation with the New York City’s new logo, at OpenLeft.

URLs:

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/03/080328085918.htm

http://openleft.com/showDiary.do?diaryId=5019

“The Apple iPhone is easily the most publicized new mobile device in recent memory. But despite all the discussion about the product, there’s relatively little hard information available to the public on its impact. How is it being used? What effect is it having on customers and on the technology industry?”

From Rubicon Consulting. Their research shows the iPhone is the first real threat to laptop computing. And that the only weakness of the iPhone is the web browser: it crashes often on major sites because it is a Safari browser, not a solid tested browser like Firefox.

In terms of web design, my experience is that the iPhone requires little or no adjustments to web page designs. Average or big fonts read better on the iPhone than small fonts. And fixed widths for the content area work better than fluid widths. (Why? Because fluid widths are greater and require horizontal scrolling to read a single line.) Otherwise, the iPhone makes it easy to browse online with a web browser.

URLs:

http://rubiconconsulting.com/insight/whitepapers/2008/04/the-apple-iphone-is-easily.html

“Over the past five years Dr Karl Blanks and Ben Jesson have generated tens of millions of dollars from web marketing, mostly for a small number of physical products businesses.

Since getting far too obsessed with SEO and Pay-Per-Click over the last few years they agreed that their next ‘big project’ would be to increase the number of visitors that actually buy from their websites…

…and they quickly became far too obsessed with conversion rate optimization instead.”

Get their free report that shows how to optimize Google’s Website Optimization tool which is an amazing, addictive tool. They also link to other optimization services. Plus they have a cute squirrel mascot with a very funny email signup privacy notice.

Found through the MailChimp blog which has it’s own cute monkey mascot. Between cute monkeys and squirrels and our Cowboy Bob as company mascots, the animals probably win.

URLs:

http://www.conversion-rate-experts.com/

http://services.google.com/websiteoptimizer/

http://www.mailchimp.com/blog/testing-tips-from-conversion-rate-squirrel/