God I hate the Internet sometimes. Generally when I’ve just done something I spend all my time advising people against – buying based upon what someone you dont know says. I’ve just ordered some stuff from Graze.com on the basis of what Kieron from here.org.uk wrote in his blog.

Why I bought based on Kierons opinion?

I’ve never met this fellow, never spoke to him on the phone, never communicated by email or chatted by messenger and here I am taking his word that buying some fruit and nuts online – rather than getting off my ass , walking to the shops and buying some – is a great idea! I’ve read his blog every so often – it was recommended to me when I started doing some bits and pieces with affiliate marketing – and for some reason its stuck in my consciousness. I’ve started to trust what he says. I dont even know if his real name is Kieron: he could be Sideshow Bob, Darth Vader or George.W.Bush based upon my real world contact has been with him.

If Aldous Huxley were here he’d be telling me that 62,400 repetitions make a truth. In social media its more like twenty shared opinions make a truth.

I’m so glad it’s not only me!

I’ve been blind sided by social media when I least expected it and  I’m probably not alone. Every day people make decisions on what to buy and what not to buy based upon what their online peer group are saying. You’ve probably done it yourself – looking for a TV you get some opinions on the model online before purchasing, thinking of going on holiday you’ll have read a few reviews of it before deciding to stay there or somewhere else etc. And all in all social media websites are helping thousands to make their decisions on where, what and when to purchase goods and services.

Anyway I’m off to wait on my nuts and fruit – eat some craisins and refine my work out routine for this week (ok the last bit isn’t true) but if I repeat it enough and get everyone else to repeat we’re not far making it a social media truth).

Social Network – Ning

At Ning you can set up your own social network- woo hoo. Who cares these things are mostly rubbish and have no traction and no way of ‘leveraging’ the traffic that you get. Its all fine and well getting traffic but if it doesn’t go where you want it to why would anyone invest in it.

So having set up a network on Ning and started doing all the things you should I started to find that people joined it. OK we’re upto about 10 now – but thats nine people I never connected with before. thats nine people who have now given me links to a website and nine people who are saying nice things about the things we do @ the social network and we’re starting to get some traction. The traffic this is delivering isn’t great but I can directly attribute 200 IBL from related websites/blogs to the core website gained through this network – oh and the target site got a mention in an email newsletter (which has generated a decent set of clicks). And its only taken about 2 hours to get up and running. Normally to get 200 good links would take longer than this and the quality/relevance would be a heck of a lot lower. And these links keep growing. If I blog about something these guys are interested in the site gets more links.

Social Network – Bebo

When I sat through the recent Omniture Summit the dude speaking was talking about how social networks help to influence buying decisions and the websites we all visit. If someone we trust on a social network gives us an opinion – and we trust them – we’re likely to take the opinion on board. I went to my brothers Bebo page and was reading his comments – and someone had posted something about a website selling collars (leather/rubber collars in an S&M stylee). I have no interest in this particular product (or any related products) but I clicked on it. Here was someone I don’t know reccomending a website I have no interest in but I went and had a look at it.

Social Networking – What is it good for?

So here’s the problem. Can you use/leverage/abuse social networks to get your site traffic and sales. I’ve been reading for ages about how you can do X, or to try Y on a social network and you’ll get the benefit. And most of its baloney. The truth is to get the most out of it you need to be building relationships. If you have a blog on a topic let the community guide you on which content to write – if they’re talking about it, they’ll read it and then they’ll link to it and they’ll tell their online friends about it – getting you links and traffic at the same time (think of it like targetted link baiting). And remember, as with all blogging, to link out. don’t hoard your links people will use your site as a conduit and if you link out well people will trust your links. the more trust you get the mroe you can ‘frmae’ debates rather than just ‘follow’ them.

So have fun networking online – don’t take it too seriously and make it easy for people to come to you.

It’s something we’ve been developing for about three months. It’s kinda low level but it takes information about a user and then uses this to intuit their intentions when they reach a website. We thought it was great little thing and the more we’ve got into it the more excited we’ve become.

The problem with your website is…

Your website talks to each consumer as if they wanted the same things.

Every user gets the same experience – irrelevant of intention. It’s not great for the consumer and it’s not great for your business. You can go to Google, or a click on a link on another website, visit somewhere from an email and get the same experience as every other user. Inspite of the fact that I may not have the same intent as every other user.

In essence all that marketing budget you spend online is to ‘engage’ prospective visitors and get them to click to your website. And once they get to your website they will be given content/information/pretty pitcures and with this information they decide to buy your services or your products. But often a website can’t cope with the myriad of expectations which your website has. It just can’t.

If you think of it channel by channel you’ll see what I mean:

SEO: you optimise your website titles and content, get great navigation, get great images and you test and refine till you get great positions for your brand terms and some core generics. For a simple example have a think about a hotel chain. If you type ‘ramada jarvis hotels‘ into Google.co.uk you get the Ramada Jarvis homepage – makes sense that you’d find it in top position.

If you type in ‘weekend break hotels’ you’ll find them at about position 4 in Google.co.uk, you’ll get the same webpage and the same experience as someone who entered the brand term. Inspite of the intention of you, the user, being completely different you get the same experience as someone who is brand aware and knows what the site does. With the ‘weekend breaks’ query resulting in traffic the psychological link between the query and the resulting website are incorrect – in effect the website has led the consumer to ‘lose the scent’.

This is often unavoidable due to the way that search engines rank pages: Ramada should be relevant for ‘weekend breaks’ their hotels are affordable and useful for trips away – but the search engine result isn’t 100% appropriate, and developing a new page for every term under the sun would make their SEO campaign hugely more expensive (and their SEO campaign is good – this was the third hotel chain I tested and the only one to have a generic term on the homepage that ranked well). If only the search engines were able to intuit more and give better results for the website owners they’d make more money.

PPC: Every man and his dog is (OK should be) using landing pages and deeplinking in their PPC campaigns. Specifically targeting pages with content relevant to the query drives better conversion. But with broad match on, even using a ton of negative keywords, you’ll find some irrelevant or unexpected traffic coming through. Try something like “Holidays in Scotland” – the result set you get may be different from mine. But if you click on the link to Hoseasons you get this page. (Yep we’ve just skewed up their PPC stats for the month as their onsite trackings just been given a dunt judging by the URL). But I can’t see anything on this page which is relevant for this query – they’ve probably bid so high on the term ‘holidays’ that they’re popping in all over the place. Their PPC agency should be shot but it highlights the point that the bids are going to waste.

Again the traffic you’re generating – what’s more you’re paying for – isn’t quite going to the page that is most appropriate for them – reducing your sales, reducing your competitiveness and making your online return on investment lower.

Affiliates: Affiliates help you make more money from your website. You pay them to get you clicks and should one of those clicks turn into a sale you pay them commission. But affiliates can be lazy – affiliate networks can be lazy – and your affiliate agency can be lazy. Take the Butlins affiliate program it has nice banners that say stuff like ‘Altogether more fun” but takes you to a page advertising “The big deal” – the disconnect is huge. You as a consumer had experience A in mind and what you get is something altogether different.

This is a bad for you – you’re not making the sales you could, for your affiliates – who will leave your program if its not making them money and ultimately , and most importantly, for the consumer.

The solution for your website is…

Make your website respond to what your customer has asked from it.

Let the behaviour of the customer before they reach your website and during their visit allow you to enhance their experience. I’ve heard people talk about website that do this as ‘Web 2.0′ websites, I call them ‘Direct Response’ websites and some call them ‘behaviourally adaptive’ websites. It’s not important what you call them it’s what they do that’ll help change your online thinking forever.

We’ve developed a very small system that does this – it uses three things it learns from users and enters beta testing in two weeks, we’re really pleased with it. The alpha tests were going well and then yesterday I attended a meeting in London. Was great – I got up at four, flew from Glasgow at 6.15 (which I only just caught), endured trains across london, got to conference venue at about 9.30 (I’m late), register (find that the early morning sessions are in one big hall and there are no seats left, the coffee doesn’t get served till 11.

I’m not a happy bunny at this point.

And then I go to one of these early morning seminars and from the first moment I felt like everything we’d been messing with to get cash out of our sites had been trumped. I was expectiong some stuff about how to target and test your website to make more cash. You know the usual A/B testing, multivariate testing that we all promise we’ll do and then I saw how strong a product from Omniture called “Test& Target 1:1” was.

It does your A/B and multivariate testing on the fly – to work out which configuration of your high traffic pages is best for users. When I say high traffic I mean really high traffic pages – you know the blue chip, high street, brand name webistes that we have probably all used at least once. It takes about 40 things about a user and seeks to derive their intention.

I’ll show you one cool little example of this – go to Google and do a search for “car insurance” – click on the directline.com result in natural search and the homepage will have the leader image below.

Direct Line Homepage image called in by Omniture Test& Target for the natural search traffic from ‘car insurance’:

Go back to Google and search for “home insurance” and again click on the directline result. You get the same page URL with different image presented.

Direct Line Homepage image called in by Omniture Test& Target for the natural search traffic from ‘home insurance’:

It’s cool – a huge UK brand is changing the content based upon your query. Not only that the system has probably tested three or four versions of that graphic to work out which one leads visitors to complete the goals most often.

What other ‘behaviours‘ can Omniture use to target websites?

If you think that this message can be changed by looking at your IP (to determine your location), your browser (as your browser can be a social calling card), you connection speed (Flash movie or animated gif depending on how fast teh files likely to download), which pages in the website you’ve already visited in the session, which pages you visited in previous sessions and its after midnight so I’m not going to put them all in. You can see, even from this short list, why I went WOW!

It was a bit dissapointing that during the Q&A that their seemed to be a lot of things that teh account handlers were ghetting batted back – as they hadn’t fully informed clients of what this ‘Test& Track 1:1′ could do for them. This thing should be flying off the shelves. Maybe it is maybe it isn’t how do you tell when the level of intimacy with the website is so subtle that you can’t see it unless you know that it is there.

Getting Test& Target isn’t going to be cheap (they never said as much). But when you think that you may need a set of 60 creatives for your homepage alone – rather than just one, the system itself will no doubt have a highish cost and you’ll have to mess about with your code a bit but if you’ve got enough traffic and your conversion rate is poor (they talked about conversion rates of below 4% at one stage being poor!!!!) it could be a viable way to go.

Until we have such a website @ mercurythread we’re gonna keep pluggin away with our little system and get better ROI for our clients by spending budgets effectively and efficently. And then when we go and sign up Sony/BMG or Hilton I know right where I’m going to be looking to get them to invest. I just hope by this stage Omniture have an affiliate program…

PS: Sorry for the epistle about behaviourally targetting websites but I think it’s damn cool. If you’ve got any comments – or know of any other systems that do this – drop us a line in the comments below.

I just got a comment by the guy/gal that runs howtogettrafficonblogs.blogspot.com. Decent enough little comment. Unfortunately for them I’m a bit of a comment checker. All links are treated as spam until I’ve checked out where they point – I dont want to link to porn or Rx by mistake and devalue any post I make – simple as.

So I read the comment and visit the site and there is my content – I mean verbatim! I’m now getting a bit pissy. So I start looking to see if its got a citation at the bottom of it. If you wanna use my stuff and cite that its mine I don’t mind. But nothing, not even a god forsaken trackback is there.

So comment goes bye bye. At present Google only has the content as being mine in the SERPS (Google search) . But I’m still niggled. Now all I need is a way for people to be able to report content theft to search engines.

So My Rule 2 of Blogging is write your own content and if you do want to join a conversation or use someone elses content at least cite it with a link.

One of the things with this is the sense that linking out is good. If someone takes the effort to read my blog and then makes informed comments upon it fantastic. It enhances my knowledge. It lets me know where they would like the conversation to go. But too many people try and remove all visibility of links. (I’m probably in a glass house as I’m on a wordpress.com subdomain where links are no followed but no follows still count to your rankings I’m sure you’ll agree). The link is like a thank you.

however I’ve noticed a trend for blogs to go furter than turning all linking off they’re not even having a comments section. Its all look at me look at me and look how good I am and drives some long tail traffic. I think this is rubbish. If someone reads one of my blogs and see’s comments – espescially if they agree with me – I gain relevance in their eyes. Already they’re starting to trust me just a little bit and I’m on the path to converting a visitor into a consumer. Further to this it informs any prospective consumer to the issues related to their interests. I much prefer informed consumers to arrogant, ill informed know it all clients who will never listen to any advice that doesn’t fit in easily with their synaptic pathways.

I can see that blogs without comments give you fresh content – remember that chestnut – and allow you to horde you PageRank and link value. In my opinion I’d rather be a link whore that a link hoarder. If you wont give out a link for a well thought out contribution then so be it. But if you wont even let me comment on your blog then I’m going to stop reading it. I’m not even going to visit anymore. From that point on when you try to join the communities I participate in you shall be persona non grata. Go back to your the blog rock you came from and stop trying to join our communities.

If anyone is interested I’m thinking of outing site who dont even have comments because it annoys me so much. have about half a dozen so far. If anyone knows any stick them below in the comments – I’ll turn their links off so they get no benefit and if they start to antagonise me any more may have to start taking down their brand terms and citing their bad blog ettiquette within the article.

Ooh and if you have trackbacks installed so much the better

Here endeth the rant!

1. Yahoo must get its social media shit together – I dont know about you but this kind of headline in an RSS subscription is pricesles. I dont even care what the content is when I get it I just know that I have to read it. Contains nice little description on Why Yahoo! should be getting into bed with, or buying, FaceBook as part of its Social Media Strategy.
2. Spice up your blog posts – Nice little piece from copyblogger on how to make your posts/SEO copy more interesting and usefule. OK its a bit Yankified but some nice little bits and pieces. Most certainly from the Veloso school of thought on writing copy
3. Axis of Evil Toys – Gotta get myself one of these axis of evil toy sets. 5 toys : George W Bush, Tony Blair, Kim Jong Il, Osama Bin Laden and Saddam Hussein. AS Saddam is deadhe’s a special glow in the dark version to represent his ghost.
4. I Phone  Trouble Shooting Tool – the best piece of viral link bait I’ve seen in ages. If only I could import this into the UK could make a killing
5. Falkirk Sit top of SPL – After horsing the Greatneans on Saturday (4-0) Falkirk sit in their correct placing in the SPL – at the top. All we have to do is play Rangers and Celtic in the next fortnight and win both games and we’ll remain there…

Thats all for now. If I find anything else will let you know.

• http://www.linuxkungfu.org/images/fun/geek/project.jpg
• http://enigmaco.de/enigma/enigma.swf
• http://www.flickr.com/photos/w00kie/sets/180637/show/
• http://www.miniajax.com/
• http://www.antidrm.hpg.ig.com.br/
• http://www.internetfrog.com/mypc/speedtest/

I would heartily reccomend to everyone to get the stumble upon toolbar installed and get surfing. You never know you may find something that distracts you so much from work you rediscover the reason why working on the web is a fanatstic waste of time.

Review of my.telegraph.co.uk

I was greeted with a simple enough account creation process it asked for my name, email twice and password twice and asked me to upload an image to go with my account. So far so good until I found that I could only upload a jpg or jpeg file as the avatar for the account – which was a bit of a pain. Allowing gif and png formats would have been better but not a huge gripe.

Writing the post was simple – write a headline and write the post. Here I was a bit less happy, to make it useable by all you cant edit code. The system does not put in an H1 tag and you cant structure it effectively with headings – you can insert lists I suppose but is a little weak but is really simple to use. So I tried to add some links by way of seeing how the interface works for this and I couldn’t submit the links easily – the window corrupts in firefox. So after working out that the submit button was the tiny line to the bottom right of the window it became workable, had to be pixel perfect with the clicks but I’ve seen worse.

You then submit the post and you are asked to tag the posts. Simple to use drop down – not long enough and lacking in options for anyone who really wants good categorization but is useful enough for normal posts. The you can add your own tags – enter them into a text line input and separate these with commas which is usable enough.

Click on the publish button and your live.

You can’t add a blog roll, outputted code is weak

my.telegraph.co.uk – Good or Bad platform

For me its a weak platform for the new blogger who is looking to dive in for the first time. Its simple to sign up and is simple to create a basic post – embedding links in firefox is a bit of a nightmare but you cant have it all. The outputted text is not coded with search engines in mind – hx tags are used for formatting so the ranking possibilities are reduced. But all in all of you want a simple to use, effective blog, and use Internet Explorer have a go.

For me its not flexible enough and doesn’t allow me the control I want. Let me know your thoughts through the comments and I’ll re-blog about it.

• The Entertainment channels will feature services such as
  • Clips of shows
  • YoutTube specific promotional videos
  • Video Diaries

  Second Entertainment Channel will include:

  • limited advertising
  • clips from programs broadcasted globally suh as Top Gear
• The Third channel will syndicate BBC news content
  • 30 clips a day will be posted
  • Users outside the UK will be subject to advertising
  • Comments will be accepted
  • User ratings and reccomendations to be introduced

In the digital age it is likely that this will be the first of many new hook ups between traditional content publishers and those in the digital age or it could simply be that the free bandwidth offered by a team up with YouTube was a cost effective option above placing all this content onto the BBC website.