4M

A client and good friend of mine recently did an awesome marketing campaign. She’s a top-producing realtor on the East Coast and she appeared at a community event. She printed up brochures and fancy raffle tickets with her logo on them and sold them to benefit a local charity, with the prize being a yacht cruise. The winner of the raffle was announced on her blog - thereby …

Apple

From valleyofthegeeks.com.

Good product, terrible website

I found this site via my treehugger email newsletter. The blurb in my email said in part,”

… proof-of-concept solar module that uses holograms to concentrate light, possibly cutting the cost of solar modules by as much as 75 percent, making them competitive with electricity generated from fossil fuels. … could bring down costs from about $4 per watt to $1.50 for crystalline …

http://www.sitepoint.com/blogs/2006/04/13/google-calendar-all-your-appointments-belong-to-us/

Let’s think about this:

Google knows where you live and work. (local + maps)

Google knows what you search for. (suggest)

Google knows what’s on your computer. (toolbar)

Google only gives you what your government thinks you should have. (hello, China)

Google knows what you sell and how much of it (adwords + analytics)

Google reads your email. (Gmail)

Google knows who you’re meeting with when. (calendar)

Google at some point may have to bend over and give …

Little gem from Jakob Nielsen in my inbox this morning:F-Shaped Pattern For Reading Web Content (Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox)
I’ve seen the eyetracking diagram that shows how users look at search results before, but this article shows two other kinds of pages - an About us page and a product page. Take a look!

If you follow Jakob Nielsen or any other content and usability gurus, the implications are obvious:
…

Ha! I knew that would get your attention. What do you mean, Marisa? Everybody knows Google has the cleanest, most usable site on the planet! Well, that’s true. But that usability does not extend to the emails they send.

I run Adwords campaigns for several of my clients. One of the features of Adwords is, you can set up periodic reporting so you can see how your campaign is performing and …

The following snippets came from Jakob Nielsen’s latest Alertbox:Growing a Business Website: Fix the Basics First (Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox)
(If you don’t know and love JN, you should. One of the ugliest sites in the world, chock-full of stuff YOU NEED TO KNOW.

Summary:
Offering clear content, simple navigation, and answers to customer questions have the biggest impact on business value. Advanced technology matters much less.

Among his morsels of excellent advice (paraphrased)

• Communicate …

Seth Godin, marketing god:

Step 1: Make something worth talking about
Step 2: Tell it to people who want to hear from you
Step 3: They spread the word to their friends
Step 4: Get permission from them to tell them about your next product

You end up not finding customers for your products, but products for your customers.

A very interesting speech Seth Godin gave to the Google-royalty:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-6909078385965257294

Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, is an ever-evolving discipline because search engines get smarter and smarter every day. There are many useful search engines out there, including topic-specific ones, but for the purposes of this conversation we’ll just use Google to represent all the search engines.

Keywords list

Step 1: Determine for what words and phrases you would like to rank highly. These are the words you use to describe what you …

Sometimes beautiful design makes me want to cry. When something just works so well you are reduced to a shivering mass in awe of it. You know what I mean. Every now and then I come across something that is just pure internet gorgeousness. Like this:

First of all, this isn’t just another pretty site. It’s the site of a company with a great product. Akismet is a …