Freddie Gilroy's paint attack

2012-01-27: One time in my junior school when no-one was around I snuck round everyones desk drawers and broke all the pencils. The next morning, the demand for the pencil sharpener and confusion on the teacher's face was down to me. I'd make a difference.

I'm no leader, I'm no sporting hero, I'm no anti-hero. I do pretty well at exams and I once dyed my fringe blue, that's about it. I'm a little more interesting as I get older, but I'm never the centre of attention. But I was at that moment, although I've told no-one that it was me until right this second. That pencil thing .. that was me. (I also stuck around after school and helped Mrs Threlfall clean out the fish tank more than once, so I think we're even).

Later, I felt a similar excitement at my first job, working behind the bacon and cheese counter at the local Co-op. At the time, housewives used to shop up and down the high street for their groceries, and the Co-op was the best place to get bacon. People used to queue out of the shop for it. So once I'd learned how to bone bacon, slice it, present it, make joints and serve customers, I was part of that. I was making a difference again, contributing to my community and at whatever I was, 16 maybe, that's genuinely how I felt .. for the first time .. part of a community, and I served people with, I hope, a smile and a chat, since I found that made the hours go faster.

When I went to university the first time to study Computer Science, I dropped out after my second year partly because of the place, but mostly because I couldn't imagine myself working for a computer company. I'd never seen one, well never been inside one .. I cycled past Systime once, didn't like the look of it. I had no clue what role I might be able to play, or who would take an interest in me.

The only other time I seriously considered a bit of vandalism was when some trees were getting cut down on West Street seemingly to build another house, but I don't think they ever did, they just cut down the trees. People, who I'm thinking were against what was happening, were throwing dogshit over the walls, so the contractors put up a notice saying it was a health hazard and asking people to stop. I got maybe 60% towards slipping out on a foggy night and painting "and no birds do sing" on the fence.

So there are my two motivations for vandalism. In the first, it's an early way of demonstrating your presence in a place, of getting noticed, of proving you can change your world. In the second, it's simply protest.

Back in November, Scarborough was blessed with a touring visit of a Ray Lonsdale sculpture Freddie Gilroy and the Belsen Stragglers.

It's based on a retired miner friend of the sculptor, who was one of the first soldiers to relieve the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp at the end of World War II. The sculpture represents all the normal people that were pulled out of an ordinary life and forced into a very extraordinary and dangerous one during the World Wars.

It proved so popular that a generous resident bought it for the town. People love it. As a resident myself, I've not yet managed to get a picture of it with no-one in the shot.

Last night, on the eve of Holocaust Memorial Day someone poured what seems to be yellow line road paint over him, and Scarborough is incensed.

Thankfully, Scarborough Borough Council's anti-graffiti team have spent the morning cleaning him up. The town isn't safe for the culprits.

Since the paint was opportunistically taken, it would appear simply to be poor timing that it happened today. Let's hope so.

What I'm curious about is what makes someone do that.

I can only relate it to my pencil episode. They may be feeling this morning that they've made a difference to their town, finally been noticed.

I'm not involved in youth work, I'm not a teacher, not even a parent and I'm not a psychologist (although that's definitely an interest) so frankly I don't know what I'm talking about. And as if in proof of my ignorance someone pointed out to me that we don't know a young person did this. But I know what drove me, in my youth. So my one contribution to the debate is this. Young people need to see how they can contribute to society, how they fit in, how they can make a difference. That's not about skill building in school, it's beyond school, it's about how they can start to interact with and make a difference to the broader society they live in. If that's not there, this sort of thing happens.

How that's achieved, I don't know. There are, of course, schemes that "keep kids off the streets" but it's not about entertainment or distraction, it's about worth and value and point. I'm just saying my guess is the people who threw the paint haven't yet worked out a way to contribute.

---

BBC News

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Post-cool

2012-01-22: Marketing has made 'cool' inauthentic and contrived. We are in a post-cool era. Simplicity, authenticity, naturalness and earnestness are our guiding values.

Good, honest, down to earth brands like Seeds of Change will lead the w .. oh, hang on. No, that's owned by Mars Inc. Not very cool, or post-cool. That'll be why you don't see the Mars logo on the Seeds of Change packs.

What that article (do read it, it'll change your life) doesn't deal with is the information society where an inauthentic brand can be outed overnight. All it takes is one creative moment and a viral social media. Greenpeace -v- KitKat.

So although the big brands will do everything it can to appeal in this post-cool world, if what they are saying isn't true, or isn't wholly true, we are all Julian Assange.

The promise of the Internet was to connect people. From a business point of view, to connect those who can help with those who have a need. Real people, real connections, not mediated through the Yellow Pages.

All of which means the small, the honest, the grassroots, the passionate, the sole trader, the human .. this is our time.

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2012, the year of the artist

2012-01-03: There are perhaps just two professions forming the final barrier between us, the people, and a sort of data-enabled nazi fascist Brooker 1984 Guantanamo privatised prison industrial silicon don't give a toss body violent RFID facially recognised society that people will sleepwalk happily into because we've been led to believe everyone else is a terrorist looting scrounger cunt and deserves nothing less.

The first, journalism, is under threat. No-one wants to pay for a newspaper any more because we are used to getting so much for free, and we don't want also to worry about what John Pilger is investigating when there's so much to be scared of in our own lives, what with the constant threat of underpant bombers overshadowing the creeping, life-as-normal threat of sociopathic corporations turning us into meat cashpoints for the needy 1% (we are surely more likely to die at the hands of some back-handed deal between a politician and his mate from school where health and safety is handed to a company legally bound only to make profits for shareholders than at the hand of a terrorist).

But look at social media and what do you see? It depends on your friends, I suppose, but I see images of the American policeman who casually maced seated, bound, Uncut protesters replacing the Statue of Liberty. I see that David Cameron poster rewritten a thousandfold.

Art (the second of those two professions) is not under anyone's control. It's us, our true voice, and it defines its own time and space to make its point. Any interpretation or understanding of art exercises our ability to empathise and see under the skin and beyond the reflex. Orwell's 1984. Picasso's Guernica.

I'm a marketer. Marketing 'spots a problem and organises itself to solve it'. Marketing provides the senses of an organisation. Great marketing also provides the conscience. Helping an old lady across the street is marketing. It's a huge force for good.

Marketing also ruins everything by turning it into a money making system. By and large people (by which I mean the minority who are healthy, up-to-speed and capable) quickly spot what's happening and learn defences. Sadly that makes our best a very cynical bunch indeed.

Often, the only defence is disengagement. It turns out consciousness isn't all it's cracked up to be. Our decisions (including buying decisions) are led by our subconscious which isn't woolly and simple but can work out maths, rhythms and systems. Our decisions are made in our subconscious, our conscious only makes up the reasons retrospectively. Marketers are more and more able to drive our subconscious. It's an unfair fight, us single people against professional 24/7 marketing teams. In our hearts we know this so we don't take even the first step. We disengage, we don't vote, don't get involved, we distrust and disconnect. If we are lucky enough to have the opportunity, we choose to deal with smaller businesses where the balance of power is more equal.

One common Internet marketing system is 'content creation' whereby companies litter the web with uninspiring drivel in order to chase search phrases their potential customers enter into Google.

A recently popular improvement on that is the infographic, where a graphic designer makes selected data both attractive and easier to understand. It's better partly because there's a creative element that makes it more desirable, more link-to-able. Of course, there's plenty more besides once you get creative.

So this year I want to realise a long held desire of mine to mix business, marketing and art and not in a shallow 'content' way, but in a collaborative, mutual learning way, so the brand and the art inform each other.

If ever our choice is limited we tend in our rush not to reinvent, we just accept the choices we are given. But also in leaderless and turbulent times like these, new ways are born. Business can lead, but marketing comes first, listening, hearing what's needed, making the case and showing the way.

The new ways? Peer to peer. Open source. Microfinance. Social. Real usability. Street democracy. But even those are hard sells. They take engagement, the very thing that's been destroyed. The change comes one person at a time through being genuine and having a soul.

It's time to re-invent, reboot, rethink, renew. It's not easy. That's what makes it a powerful differentiator. Not everyone will do it. It's what I'm here for.

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Facebook finally died yesterday

2011-11-22: It's been dying for a while.

Every time they didn't take the security of our data seriously and sold it off to big corporations so that the ads we saw reflected what we'd typed, it underlined how many were listening.

Every time they changed the look of the site, people hated the change.

The beautiful thing about Facebook was that people embraced it as their own. Despite it being free, we felt it was ours. Despite everything it provided, we resented its need to pay for itself through advertising.

Personally, I clicked down a notch when it became evident they were selling serious data to selected big companies. Selling data is OK so long as I can buy it too. Selling data to skew the world more towards big corporations is not something I want to support.

I also clicked down a notch when The Guardian (my newspaper of choice) set up with Facebook to force every Guardian click go through an app, and then shared everything I clicked before I'd actually read it. I'd rather read the stories about huge breasted ladies getting charged extra on Ryanair (they didn't I made that up) without sharing, and curate my own list of articles thank-you very much. Partly because I want to manage my own public face, but also because if I share a link it's not because I have social diarrhea, but because I specifically want to share it to my friends on Facebook. We are not a series of clicks.

Nevertheless, I love Facebook. I work for myself, Facebook represents my work colleagues. It's my defence against loneliness, sat alone in my office all day.

But it doesn't feel like Facebook listened. Where's the evidence they did? They obviously feel the pressure of G+ and Twitter, don't want to lose their market leadership, so are fighting a features battle more than listening to their users.

Facebook's integration with Skype to provide us with video calls with any of our friends sounded enormous, but it hasn't taken off.

People seem underwhelmed by Timeline.

It runs deeper than mere features. Facebook has lost our trust. They can make fivers pour out of our CD drives and we wouldn't care. We have written Facebook out of our lives.

The integration of websites with Facebook will be another nail in their coffin. We want to share what we want to share. We want control. We don't want a sort of auto-share that tells everyone where we've been across the web, nor indeed any risk that it might.

I'm training an older person in how to use Facebook. It's inconsistent ("do I press the button to post or press return?"), and they've no sooner 'got' it than it changes.

The turning point seems to have been at the last update, when the top right Twitter-like news ticker arrived and people started putting post-it notes on their screen to hide its distracting movements.

Along with that came the re-organisation of our timeline, so it was, without our choosing, sorted so that the most important things came top. Previously, it was just in time order (they retreated a little, now at the top of your newsfeed, on the grey line, you can reset the sort order back to 'recent stories first').

People don't understand the machinations going on underneath to provide us with the most interesting stuff, how much dross we are being saved from. They want the feeling of control. It is, after all, our data.

After that update, people seemed to use Facebook less. Whether they really did, or whether the new timeline just gave that impression, I don't know.

But last Sunday, I sat with my partner and we played Scrabble. In the absense of anything much interesting going up on Facebook and now I have a shinyphone, I shared the occasional photograph of my progress through 7-vowel tiles and the fact that we've kept a total of our scores for almost twenty years. 'Intimate' stuff that I think Facebook is actually for, despite the calls of those who would rather not know what sort of sandwich I've just eaten.

See, it saddens me that people look to Facebook for entertainment without making an effort to be entertaining. OK, being a comedian isn't everyone's bag, but Facebook is us. It's not interesting unless you're interesting. Give a little and you'll get a lot. If we don't, we really are thoroughly screwed as a culture.

I got my strokes, which is obviously part of the allure of Facebook. You put something in and real people comment, usually nicely, and it makes you feel good. So long as you don't start feeling like a Facebook whore, it's good. But the usual suspects weren't there.

And yesterday, nothing much happened on Facebook. I have 529 friends and nothing much happened.

In fact, something big did happen. I closed Facebook, because nothing was happening.

Whereas usually at the end of a task I'd check for Facebook updates .. it's just there, so I'd check .. I got the feeling that checking was wasting my time because there was nothing there.

So yesterday I think Facebook hit a turning point. Facebook died.

I suspect it will become a little more shrill: "but, look at our shiny new features!". Very Californian. I don't know what's next. Twitter is there of course. Personally, I'm going to move back more to my blog.

Don't get me wrong. I love Facebook. I wish it had got it right. But it messed up. It lost people's trust. Once is OK. Twice .. just. Thrice .. it's systematic, part of the DNA, won't ever change.

Maybe they even killed Social Media. Maybe, with the revolution that's coming, we will look back on this period and wonder how we ever got boxed into our homes like we have. Maybe the real social is coming, where social media itself gets boxed in as a tool we use to bring us in touch with real people, in the real world.

Facebook. It's so sad. I love you. But you broke it all yourself.

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Hope & Social Sleep Sound Garden Party

2011-08-01: Going to see Hope & Social is like waking up in Trumpton. The band play in lovely blue jackets on the bandstand, there are cupcakes and bunting and the women smile at you .. not as a come on, but as shorthand for "how do you do" and "have a good morning". They also dance .. for the sheer joy of living.

They are safe to do that because I am not a rapist. Rapists, stalkers, bastards and Andrew Lansley wouldn't like Hope & Social because the band is about life and love, family and friends, making things not breaking them, enthusiasm and positivity, art, and hope.

The Hope & Social audience includes many children. Nice, well behaved children who breastfeed and others who wonder at leaves.

I don't think anyone swore all Sunday. No drunken oafishness either.

We need Hope & Social.

I won't mention the bad things in the real world, now is not the time.

So let's just run through the Hope & Social Sleep Sound Garden Party, 2011.

To start with, we were each sent modelling putty with which to make a blackbird which would be hung from a tree in the garden. Mine (the one with twigs) was called Clive (from Clive and twenty blackbirds):

There was food, boy was there food:

The silent disco:

Here's the band choosing danceworthy tunes:

And later they invaded the String Fellows' set, conga style:

A hammock acoustic stage:

Cool things to buy:

Paintball swingball:

The decorating of letters for a mobile that (I think) said 'Have fun. Make art':

A telephone box where you could leave a message with the possibility that your contribution might make some impact on a future song:

Band members schmoozing the crowd

voting for the best cake and donning a disguise then trying to stimulate demand for their products by buying them themselves:

The Voices of the Day choir singing against a building that looks like piano keys: The owner of the house got into the swing of things

A very busy face painter:

Hula Hooping:

A fire pit for later:

A lady bought the special Hope & Social Sleep Sound Garden Party hammock in the auction:

Pegging and being pegged was important:

Two stages:

And so we lay under an old mulberry bush and listened to .. everything.

StringFellows:

The Voices of the Day choir:

And then ... Hope & Social happened

It got Scottish:

The silent dancers joined in:

We had an actual conga:

(By the way, there was a cracking sax 'solo' hidden in there somewhere, not sure if I got that on video.)

Here's a video of the whole day by shotbysodium.com. How can you not love the silent disco woman at 6:20? And we appear in the crowd at 8:55 on the left, I'm tall with an orange top and videoing the conga .. like it matters.

You know when a Hollywood movie tells you that love conquers all and you go 'yeah, well, that's soppy Americans for you'.

I'm not convinced love conquers all. But Hope & Social can conquer all, because they have love along with vision, enthusiasm, skill and a growing cohort of helpers who would do anything for these guys. I don't need to blab on .. the material speaks for itself. Hope & Social have the answer.

Only one thing can beat Hope & Social, and that's the taste of a ripe fruit from a hundred year old mulberry tree.

Until then, there's Hope & Social.

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Strange results checking client SEO position in Chrome

2011-12-19: Hmm, this is curious.

Time was, to work out what position in the search engines you were for a particular search term, you just searched for the term and counted your position.

Then there were the days of Web Position Gold with all its snazzy reports about whether you were going up or down for a zillion phrases. Then I discovered they weren't abiding by Google's terms and conditions, and their software was running from my IP address .. I was running the risk of being blacklisted. I dropped it instantly.

It came down to focus and manually checking position.

The issue with that is .. Google remembers what you've been doing, so if I'm working with a client Google thinks I like their site, so when I search, their site appears higher for me than it does for a normal searcher.

Then there's local .. results getting more emphasis if they are closer.

So I've been using a clean Google Chrome with cleared history with Google Instant turned off and showing 100 results per page, with the Number Search Results extension to count the position. I search for my phrase, use Ctrl+F to search for my website, and that extension shows me the position. Fine.

Except, not fine. Now, it looks like if I set Chrome (and Epiphany, fwiw (on Linux) and Safari on Mac, they all seem to use the same engine) to display 10 results per screen, my client is at position #10. If I set it to 100 per screen, my client is at #19. The results seem more expanded, with more results per website being displayed.

Got any thoughts on this? I'm at @JohnAllsoppIM on Twitter, or email me at john@johnallsopp.co.uk, I'll summarise what transpires (if anything) here.

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The Public Sector strike

2011-11-29: This strike, it's all wrong

I'm a little bit weirded out by the strike tomorrow and how the unions seem willing to call it a pensions strike. Maybe it's a legal thing.

To my mind, most people are hurting. So, if I'm Adrian Average and my pay's been cut, I feel my job's at risk, I've a family I'd die for .. why would I give a rat's tutu about someone else's pension? Pension .. that is. That luxury that many of us don't have.

A public sector strike about their pensions seems selfish of them, and since we live increasingly in a "what's in it for me" world, I'd say that just encourages everyone else to say "well, stuff them, I'm suffering too".

Perhaps we live in a more selfish world than the one union techniques were forged in.

Calling it a pension strike doesn't really rouse the masses in favour.

So let me just be clear. Given all the hurdles public sector workers will have had to go through to get a legal strike, I'm absolutely in favour.

I'm also in favour of the government's cuts. I want the deficit down, I don't want to be spending the same on servicing debt as we do paying for our armed forces.

There's just one thing. It has to be fair.

Letting Vodafone off £8bn of tax, and then expecting everyone on low pay to foot the bill isn't fair.

Women are bearing the brunt of these cuts. This government didn't even bother to do an equality assessment on the initial emergency budget. Under pressure, they acknowledged they should have done, but changed nothing.

Young people, too. If you can't afford to learn (university tuition, not having parents mobile and wealthy enough to move to the catchment area of a good school (where the house prices are inflated), removal of the EMA), and there are no jobs anyway .. you're not strapped on to this society at all. That's dangerous.

Meanwhile, we can't touch business, can't touch bonuses. We can knock women back thirty years, push a million young people onto the dole, take 15% off the pay of everyone in the public sector, but we can't touch business, ooh no, couldn't possibly. That would demotivate them.

This strike should be against the unfairness of this government's cuts. Not against the cuts, but pro equality. I'm moaning about poor PR.

15% off the public sector? Fine. Then 15% off bonuses, bosses pay and business profits too. We'd probably find, it only needs to be 5% if we did that. We are all in this together, after all.

Either that or get this guy to do your PR (bit sweary, warning).

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Musicport 2011, a review

2011-11-09: "I don't like folk music or world music"

My partner and I were once invited round to a dinner party and the hosts asked "do you eat vegetarian food?" It was like being asked if we like food.

'World music' is a bit like that. Where a meat eater presented with the words 'vegetarian food' might wince at the thought of tofu, my first mental connection with 'world music' is the sort of thing Kanda Bongo Man does, which is great for an all night festival in a culture where dance comes naturally .. but I don't dance, and Bridlington?

The point is, if you like music, you like world music .. it's obvious when you think about it. There's such a lot of variety outside of mainstream promoted music in the UK. Frankly, part of my lack of excitement about music recently may well be down to how music works here.

I'd wanted to go to Musicport since 2009 when a friend got married and had a blessing at the festival where a wedding band played. I was blown away by their drummer (being a drummer myself), and by a Bulgarian choir (I can't tell you how powerful this is when you stand right next to it).

Since then I've started publicising festivals, combining pre-publicity over social media with 'live' coverage of the shows using video, photography, podcasting and sometimes interviews. So this year, I did that, for Musicport.

I was there from the opening ceremony to the final party and I can tell you .. I'm blown away.

So let me just run you through it. Musicport starts at 6pm on the Friday and it feels like a warm up evening. One beautiful moment was watching the tweets from youngsters at Headlands School as they prepared to take the stage with Asere, and their excitement at meeting 12lve, Goldie's Band.

They learned songs with Asere and their happiness on stage was an absolute joy to see.

Have you heard of 12lve, Goldie's Band? Earlier this year, drum 'n' bass DJ Goldie led a project to find young people who were talented, dedicated to music and were battling adversity. It was one of those TV programmes that everyone talked about the day after. Except me, I didn't see it, but many people urged me to watch it. It's not been available since, but it's being repeated soon.

Anyway, Goldie found his future stars and formed them into a group, called 12lve, and they played on Friday at Musicport, and wow, they are outstandingly talented. Many individuals from the group performed their own sets throughout the weekend, and the obvious outstanding performer on everyone's lips was Natalie Duncan.

12lve is a little strange, as a band. It's more like a club where each person gets to perform one of their songs with the rest of the band as backing. So you get the sitar player who's written his song in 7/8 time. Natalie Duncan who sings at the piano. The amazing singer Kwabena Adjepong, stunning beatboxer Jack Bee, and the outrageous harmonica player Will Pound. Natalie Duncan isn't the only one with amazing talent, but somehow she's the one most remember.

Musicport goes on well into the night, I particularly liked the sound of Kath Canoville's Global Meltdown.

On the Saturday, Musicport gets down to business with early dance classes, Andy Kershaw was there to publicise his book, Fran Smith, the awesome Celtarabia (all the best tunes were written 500 years ago), and a pairing many mentioned later as a highlight Randolph Matthews & Byron Johnston, and DJ Tooly.

I was broken by Chris Wood. Now this is curious, because he's the archetypal folk singer that I'd previously written off as not my sort of thing, but in doing a daily podcast prior to the festival, I'd gotten to understand where he's coming from. As, I suppose, all folk artists do, he has a strong interest in the people's history, and that's important in this whitewashed, spun world .. here's my introduction to Trespasser in the Musicport Podcast of 8 October that really turned around my appreciation of him.

His song "Hollow Point", about the shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes is a masterpiece not just of songwriting, but for me it feels necessary that it's there. Not enough has been done to mark the events of that day. It won the BBC2 folk song of the year.

My role in Musicport was to butterfly between events, sharing video and photographs along the way as near 'live' as possible. But I couldn't leave Chris Wood. His song "One in a million" is one of the most beautiful things I've ever heard, the story written, apparently, by Hugh Lupton. Afterwards, I needed time to handle the emotion of his performance.

After that, came Mercedes Peon. An artist who has studied the traditional music of Galicia and brought it, not really up to date, but well into the future. I'm not sure it comes across well in video, it's more elemental when you're there. She started out with a near empty hall and ended up with a full hall of converts. Me? I was up for it from the start, I love her album SOS.

She doesn't speak English, tried us with French and Spanish and she was only getting to a few people so in one beautiful moment she asked for someone (I think she asked for a woman, but I might be wrong) to come up and translate, and two women did volunteer themselves. The woman who did end up translating did a superb job of passing on Mercedes' message of female power, solidarity and ending the system of "cock of the roost". After that, it seemed, the crowd really 'got' what she was doing. See for yourself: 1, 2, 3 (be sure to get to the groove at 3:20 on that one), & 4.

After that, the amazing Mary Coughlan, and the night finished with Hugh Masekela and for those with anything left in them, dancing with The Boat Band or maybe Jamie and Alex from the Flying Chilli Beats.

Sunday has a different, more offbeat feel, starting at noon with The Third Policeman, a steampunk amateur opera illustrating the arcane labrynth financiers create to outfox the common man. Oh yes.

Jonny Kearney and Lucy Farrell were beautiful, The Boy With Tape On His Face hilarious, Soznak seriously dancy, and then came Mari Boine.

Mari Boine is from a people called Sami who occupy the northern reaches of Norway, Sweden, Finland and Russia and so are split, rather like the Kurds, and their culture has, at various times, been banned.

There's a little bit of Bjork in there, some native American Indian feel, but overall it's like a tribal gathering. The whole sound is underpinned by the awesome drummer Gunnar Augland .. I've not seen an audience give a drummer quite so much appreciation before, he almost stole the show, have a listen: 1, 2, 3.

After that, Kanda Bongo Man, and Musicport was over.

Overall? Firstly, it's an incredibly well organised festival. I can't say the same for the Bridlington Spa website, but everything else was fabulous. I had a set of stage times that were kept to. The food was glorious, the sound, perfect.

The audience is an interesting demographic, I noticed lots of wheelchair users, so the fact that it's a festival that's not in a field must be a bonus. It really does have the feeling of a festival. The other thing I noticed was there were lots of groups of women. Perhaps that's because there was such a fabulous line-up of strong women performers.

I'd always looked at the ticket price of Musicport, a little over £100 for the weekend, and thought it a lot of money to spend.

Now, after that weekend, I think it's an absolute steal. I'll be back, whether I'm working there or not. I'm engaged with music again. I've artists I need to know more about. I'm excited, rejuvenated. And I'm so very thankful that outside the mainstream there's fabulous music being made.

One thing I'd love to have the chance to experience that didn't quite seem to be there is whatever the Indian and Pakistani community are up to nowadays, whether it's Bhangra or whatever .. I might be in danger of saying a 'dad' thing, but when I got a chance to listen to Bobby Friction, it felt like Peel used to, so I've a feeling that's where the innovation is in the UK.

And I'd love to hear something from black America, I don't know what's going on but there must be something, a hip hop sound system or something.

Right at the end, Kate announced the Spa has been booked for next year 2-4 Nov, end of half term, and early bird tickets are available, so .. get yourself sorted and I'll see you there next year.

You can follow Musicport on Twitter and Facebook.

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Marketing lessons from Musicport: where did you come from?

2011-11-09: I've just come back from helping to market Musicport, an international music festival and something really struck me.

I pretty much knew nothing about any of the artists playing, even the famous ones like Hugh Masekela. I've been out of music for a long time .. I can't listen to music and work, and I work all the time. The only music I listen to is for the covers band I drum in.

Prior to the festival, I did a tune a day podcast for two months in which I randomly selected a tune from the CDs provided by the artists. Randomly, because I knew nothing about them so couldn't make an informed decision.

Worse .. I didn't think of myself as being into folk or world music. I didn't. I do now.

Anyway, my point is .. I started with all these artists from a clean slate.

Patrick Hanlon's Primal Branding says there are seven elements to creating a powerful brand, and one of those is the creation story. In order to trust, we need to know where someone is coming from. It helps us predict what they will do, makes us feel comfortable, helps us model that person in our heads. So, in the book, he says, we all know the story of Steve Jobs, of the guy who created FedEx after his college professor laughed at him, the founding of the United States .. everything, everyone, started somewhere, and if we don't know, they are just .. left hanging.

So let's just shortlist the artists that meant such a lot to me over the weekend.

Chris Wood is the archetypal folk singer bearded bloke with a guitar that I didn't much care for beforehand. He provided two CDs to the podcast, so got twice as many plays and in his album Trespassers he talks about the English enclosures which, frankly, I had no idea about. He also won the BBC Radio 2 best folk song award for this year for his song about the shooting of Jean Charles De Menezes. So now, this is no fey folk singer warbling on about the herring season, this is a politically active man of the people. My kinda man. We must hold similar values. He and I must be similar.

When he played, on the day, I didn't realise another element to him. He's soft and gentle and loving, and sings of marital love, and lifetime love. My values, again. Love with depth.

I met him afterwards when he signed a CD and I said "I don't like folk music" and he said "Oh, neither do I". In reply to something or other I asked, he said, "The English don't have enough pride. Have you ever seen crap Flamenco? No, because they are proud of it, they give it love and attention. And I don't mean ridiculous jingoism, Land of Hope and Glory stuff, I mean .. if you grow apples, grow fabulous apples. Put in the care and attention to detail, and be proud of it."

The guy's Ghandi!

So, I wanted to see him because I'd modelled him as politically aware and with the folk award he came with social proof. The more I listened, the more of him I could model and agree with.

Mercedes Peon is a Spanish artist who has studied the traditional music and women of Galicia and built a modern sound inspired by those rhythms and sounds. I like Spain, and I'm a feminist, so we're all connected up there.

She stands at a drumkit, so it's rhythm based. I'm a drummer. More connected.

Mari Boine is a Sami, an ethnic group living across the borders of northern Finland, Norway, Sweden and Russia, whose culture was banned and suppressed. Cool, a story of triumph over adversity. Another strong woman. Music of the land and the people. And tribal rhythms. All connect strongly with me.

Jonny Kearney and Lucy Farrell .. this is interesting in terms of mental modelling. I didn't know anything about them, walked into the room and they sounded so delicate and beautiful. But the tipping point for me was when Lucy chided Jonny for eating three MacDonalds in one night. It felt like they were a couple. I've no idea if they are, but in my mind they are and I just fell in love with them as an idea.

Having adolesced to punk, I'm used to the music of dissent being energetic and young. Yet here I was discovering a new world of music of dissent, music of the people, a way of cutting through the spin of the BBC news. It was all good.

So, is it the mere existence of a back story that works, or does the back story need to 'connect' with the buyer? Is it about demonstrating that the buyer and seller are cut from the same cloth, hold the same values, are like each other. Similarity is a persuader, people like people like themselves.

Iain Matthews, used to be in Fairport Convention, massive load of albumns, big in the folk world .. I've no links with Fairport Convention so it means nothing to me.

Hugh Masekela .. I mean, enormous, and huge respect to him, a long history, lived through the apartheid. Nothing much hit home for me. But then, he didn't send any CDs, so I never had the time to get to know him.

12lve, Goldie's Band .. I know the story .. Goldie travelled the country to find talented and committed musicians who had used music to overcome adversity (how's that for a strong back story) and mentored them into becoming a band. It's like a supergroup, each member is a master of their art. Big respect to them. But I didn't see the TV programme. Didn't get a CD. I haven't, yet, let them into my heart.

Mary Coughlan, survived drink, drugs, financial cock ups and lived to tell the tale. But that doesn't speak to me hugely and .. no CD beforehand so I didn't spend enough time to let her in either.

This business about not receiving a CD is interesting. It feels, to me, like a weeny little snub. It's a negative. We asked, you didn't send. First impressions, the void is filled with it. Just from a marketing perspective, that doesn't seem good.

Mari Boine didn't send a CD tho.

So how do we use this, online?

It means a couple of things.

Firstly, it means, get your history out there. Let people know where you come from and what you stand for. And craft your story. Make it memorable, make it resonate, and consider the values you are publicising and whether they resonate with your target audience .. they need to match.

Secondly, it means you have to find a way to make that real, for free, so people can experience you and see if you do what you say you do. Whether that's on a Twitter stream or through free samples or whatever, people often need a little time to trust you. But once you're in, unless you mess it up (Andy Kershaw), you're in forever.

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What it feels like to have ME/CFS

2011-06-06: My partner has ME/CFS. Here's my experience of her level of ME/CFS (there are people less affected, and people more affected). The CFS stands for Chronic Fatigue Syndrome and people with it are shying away from the term because often if you say to someone "I have CFS" they say "oh yes, I get that" or "I have a friend who has that".

On investigation, they are often referring to someone who has assumed they have CFS because they are chronically tired. That's not ME/CFS.

Your doctor will diagnose you with ME/CFS if you have persistent cognitive and physical fatigue that is not relieved by sleep or rest (that's important), that's gone on for more than six months, and if there is no other reason why you might be fatigued .. such as being a single parent and trying to hold down a job.

It's also not depression. If you ask someone who is depressed what they would ideally like to do today, they'll go "nothing, really". If you ask someone with ME/CFS what they'd ideally like to do today and they'll say "I want my life back .. I want a job so I can contribute again, to be able to go out, to have a goal and reach it, to go for a walk on my own, to drive again .. ". In ME/CFS, it's not the will that's missing. Actually, strong drive and ambition may have contributed to getting ME/CFS in the first place.

There's no cure, you just have to be taught how to live with it.

The main thing about the ME/CFS symptoms is the fatigue is all pervasive. If a healthy person goes for a run, they feel bodily tired afterwards so they'll watch tv afterwards. If you spend all day doing brain work, you'll probably want to go for a walk after, or go to the pub.

Remember your O level biology? The mitochondria in every cell in your body that run Krebs cycle and turn sugar into energy your body can use? With ME/CFS, it's like your mitochondria are turned down to 1/10.

So movement-wise, of course you can't walk far. Certainly can't do anything energetic like dance or swim. You get out of condition. Things sag a little more than you'd like. You can't eat like you did. You pull muscles more easily.

Your energy reserve is, actually, available if you did need to go into town to, I don't know, go for a DLA (Disability Living Allowance) assessment or something. But it's like a water tank where the mitochondria are filling up the tank very, very slowly. You need to rest in order not to take from the energy reserve tank so you can make that trip, then when the trip is over and the tank is empty, you'll need to rest for a few days while your slow mitochondria refill the energy reserve tank, drip, drip, drip.

People who see you out on that day, they don't know about the blank days of prep, and the empty days of rest after. They see you all arms and legs and smiles (of "thank goodness I'm out of the house and ooh look, there's a person I once knew") and walkie walkie and think "there's nothing wrong with her". They don't know you haven't showered .. it was shower OR walk.

But it's not just bodily fatigue. It's fatigue in every cell. Heart fatigue when it can't pump around enough blood to get you up the hill. Liver fatigue so you get drunk on half a glass of wine. Brain fatigue so you can't pluck up the effort to find the word to finish your sentence. Sluggish digestion.

There's a condition called fibromyalgia which often occurs at the same time as ME/CFS. It causes general, constant muscle and connective tissue pain. We thank our lucky stars every day that Ali doesn't have that, she can, at least, get comfortable.

Officially in the UK, ME/CFS is all in the mind, it's cheaper that way for the NHS and health insurance companies. ME/CFS treatment centres are part of psychiatric services. Yet .. also officially .. people diagnosed with ME/CFS are banned in the UK from ever giving blood. Yep, go figure.

250,000 people have ME/CFS in the UK. That's one in every 240 people. Quite a few, you or someone you love could get it, anytime. Yet nothing's really being done. That's four times as many as have HIV, and that's a deliberate comparison because I think it's fair to say most ME/CFS sufferers think the best chance of a cure stems from the work being done by the Whittemore Peterson Institute (WPI) and at the time of writing, their stance (as I understand it) is that the cause might be a retrovirus called XMRV. If they are right (and it is surely contested) XMRV will be only the third human retrovirus discovered. The others are HIV and HTLV which gives you leukemia.

Viruses change cellular DNA. Most viruses change cellular DNA and have us sneeze in order to pass on the virus DNA, and in doing so they trigger our immune response. They set off a race against time, to infect another host before they are destroyed by our defences.

Retroviruses don't trigger our immune response. They may even infect our immune system. They stay with us for life. Consequently, they don't need to make us sneeze to pass themselves to another host. It's enough that there's a way to infect just one other person before we die. That's in principle, no-one knows whether ME/CFS or XMRV are passed on in any way.

The Whittemore Peterson Institute, by the way, is a privately funded organisation set up by a husband and wife team whose daughter has ME/CFS.

So we have hope in the WPI, a fabulous community, and there's a film coming out:

New WHAT ABOUT ME? Teaser/Trailer from Double D Productions on Vimeo.

The WPI say there's some bad news coming, then some really good news, so we'll have to push through the bad, it seems.

And there's an amazing book: Osler's Web: Inside the Labyrinth of the Chronic Fatigue Syndrome Epidemic which is possibly the best piece of investigative journalism I've read .. it's about 2.5 inches thick, yet totally readable and goes back to the very first outbreak.

People will look back at this time, at everyone's stories, from the boy they didn't believe so they threw him in the deep end of a swimming pool and then had to dive in to rescue him, to the children taken from their mothers, and the ATOS assessments that leave single ME/CFS people with no income at all (check this PDF), and they will ask why, when there are so many infected, we helped the banks, we wanted people in work, but we pushed ME/CFS down and said it was all in the mind.

Incidentally, that 'After ATOS' website suffered a crippling denial of service attack recently.

Our day will come. And when it does, there will be hell to pay.

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Edwina Hayes

2011-06-28: There's something beautiful about Lancashire women's humour. Think Peter Kay .. affectionate, family-based, real-life stories about chip shops, Tesco and crushes.

I completely didn't expect that from Edwina Hayes on Sunday.

When I used to provide a giglist in Scarborough, I'd cover all sorts of music. I adolesced to punk and I saw the light with the Chemical Brothers, so Edwina's not normally my cup of tea.

But she always cut through in that giglist. I'd listen to what's coming up in the week and there's this and that and the other and then, wow, who's this Edwina Hayes? She lives in Driffield? Well, that's just half an hour away!

So that's it. Her. A guitar. And, she laughs, "songs that make you want to kill yourself".

But .. not really. Her songs are full of life. Possibilities. Losing herself. Maybe that's the connection between her and the Chemical Brothers. With them it's "Don't think, just let it flow" and what I want to do is just turn off my head and feel the rhythm.

With Edwina, it's safe to turn off my head, too, and just feel. Hers are stories of love and loss, of wanting, of clear emotion.

She's so self deprecating, I wonder if she really knows how good she is.

She's all over .. go see her. People who know say it was an outstanding Acoustic Lounge night. Have a listen: Edwina Hayes.

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The March for the Alternative

2011-03-28: We went to the March for the Alternative yesterday. It was the first time I've been on a protest since 1981.

My key reason, for what it's worth, is that I've a horrible feeling these cuts are basically politically and idealogically motivated. They are timed to the political cycle so the finances look much improved when the next election comes up.

In business management and public relations (PR) (remember, Cameron comes from the world of PR), if a company has bad news the rule is .. get it all out at once, have your bad news day, fire everyone you can, be ruthless. Because tomorrow's story is that you're back in the black and you're hiring. That's much better than a year's bad news as you nibble away at the problem. That's what's going on here, politically: extreme cuts now, the sooner to get to the good news. Our job, then, is to measure the size of the cuts, and to compare what they give us back against what they've taken away.

In other words, these cuts are this quick, and this deep, for the benefit of the Conservatives and no-one else.

Granted, newspapers are out to shock and motivate, but here's the story that turned us active, Polly Toynbee in the Guardian explaining how the government's policies for the NHS amount to a charter for private companies to force NHS departments to compete with them for 'business' and .. if the private companies promise quality won't fall and can do it cheaper, it will be illegal not to pass the business to them. Private business taking over the NHS, cherrypicking, and leaving the NHS essentially non-existent or trying to handle the non-profitable work.

We live with, and are part of, the ME/CFS community. That's not an easy illness to diagnose or treat, so we'll be left behind with the don't knows.

Also, I rather liked NICE where money was allocated to its most effective use. If the GPs hold their own funds, it seems that we'll have to make a case for them to spend their money on us. It will be a case of who shouts loudest .. who has the resource to push for good treatment. Basically, next time you visit your GP, take your lawyer. You can afford a lawyer, can't you?

So those were the issues that vexed us specifically but Ali's worked in the NHS for years as an occupational therapist (OT), so we know the NHS from the inside, and we are here to protect it.

We all agree, everyone agrees, that cuts are necessary, that we've been living off the future, and we all want to get our finances straight again, Truth be told, we weren't comfortable with weird number crunching growth in the first place. The argument is twofold. 1) The cuts can be done less destructively .. over a longer period and using growth and employment to build tax revenues we can use to pay some of the debt, and 2) the cuts aren't being fairly distributed. On a Radio 4 programme an egghead said that austerity packages are accepted by populations if they are perceived to be fair. These are perceived to be anything but.

Although I can't say I've ever really been an honest worker in this mould, I was proud to march with OTs, librarians, schoolteachers, care assistants, for public services and an alternative our government says doesn't exist.

Vodaphone, in November, was surprised to be let off £6bn in tax it owed (worth 81 Comic Relief red nose days). If just Vodaphone had paid what it owed, and it appears they did think they were going to have to, our austerity package would have been much less severe. And that's just Vodaphone, never mind the banks.

Hence the UKUncut campaign of bail-ins, good natured, creative sit-ins and temporary business disruptions (it's OK, they can afford it) of businesses that haven't paid their dues.

So there it is, inescapably, the big companies who created this mess are being let off, while those who dig the road, feed your grandmother, who face down danger to rescue you from it or have drawn the short straw of life and are unable to care for themselves are forced to pay. No problem with paying, we are happy to play our part, so long as everyone else does too.

It was Thursday when we confessed to each other that actually, we wanted to go, and by Friday we'd coralled friends into cat feeding and putting us up. The Big Society in action.

Here are the pics and here, the videos (I've no idea why it puts up an old DTs video, but the most recent (assuming you're looking at this soon after the event) are the ones .. they are presently untitled.

Basically, we were pretty much at the back end of the march, literally at the end at one point (I turned around and there was nobody there!)

For that reason I think we got caught up in some of the Black Bloc activities around Fortnum and Mason.

The mood changed as we passed Piccadilly and we started to see Black Bloc people around and felt like we just wanted to get along and reach Hyde Park.

As we neared Fortnum and Mason (why them?), as you can see from videos and photographs, we saw people climb up onto the front of the shop, we saw the graffiti happening. Someone lit a long-lasting white-sparking firework in the crowd, and we saw a column of police with round shields run ahead. Then people started walking back, away from whatever was happening and advising us not to go any further (we didn't see what was happening, but saw it on the TV afterwards).

Fortnum and Mason had been occupied peacefully by UKUncut for a few hours and only one arrest had been made through the whole march. Then completely separate Black Bloc tactics took place outside the shop to which the police responded (BBC).

We decided to retreat and give up the attempt to reach Hyde Park, wisely it seems as things didn't calm down until much later in the night.

My take on the whole thing is this. The TUC organised a peaceful show of numbers, and that is powerful to any government who wants our vote. My partner and I asked of our friends and acquaintances, if they couldn't make the march but wanted to show their support, to give their name and we would write it on the wheels of her wheelchair. We ended up with 50 names including our own, between the two of us. The news is currently reporting a 400,000 turnout. 400,000 x 25 is 10 million people in support of the aims of the march.

Separately, UKUncut continued its programme of peaceful shutdowns and occupations of businesses that should have paid their tax fairly.

Separately again from that, others used Black Bloc tactics to bring violence and disruption.

My partner tackled one of them. "Please please don't do this". They looked at her, but turned their backs. They were young lads.

We had a fabulous time with the police. We chatted to two at one point .. they said "let's just hope it goes peacefully", we said "we're marching for you too you know" and one said "yes, well, we're not allowed to voice a political opinion, but the government are bastards".

Another time we had a grin with a policeman who stepped back a moment as he realised we were going to run over his toes with the wheelchair. We had a number of other conversations, always helpful, always informative.

Even the riot police heading for F&M ran in in one single column (where the black bloc had barged into people on the way through).

That's the point, though, the march was for the police too, for their pay and conditions. This wasn't a riot against them.

I've got two takes on this.

First, I think Cameron, being PR savvy, wanted a peaceful demonstration. He didn't want the country to start feeling like there was serious civil unrest happening. So I think the police didn't face off the damagers because Cameron doesn't want to look like Thatcher under the poll tax riots.

Secondly, those Black Bloc guys were very young, and (although it's a while ago now), I do remember being that age. Something clicked into place when I got my first job, part time at the local Co-op, where I boned, sliced, presented and served bacon to my town and community who used to queue out of the shop for what was the best bacon in town at a time when housewives used to walk the length of the high street comparing the price of butter and then natter about it over the garden fence. Until that job, I hadn't got a place in the community I'd grown up in. All I could do to make a difference would be to graffiti or damage .. look, I did that. I played in a band, but that's to my peers, still separate. Now, I felt like .. I was part of it. I belonged. I understood then, what it felt like to be part of society. My reckoning is, those Black bloc kids were getting that feeling (I did that, look, I'm on the telly) and a big youthful buzz from what they did. But they were just kids, not yet knowing what it means to have a family and to work for something.

So I'm not saying everyone should get a job and everything will be alright, but it does raise some further questions about the unemployment that will result from the austerity package.

Anyway, just to be clear, and I think that was reported well, the TUC march was peaceful, UK Uncut was peaceful, Black bloc essentially were parasites on the day, turning it to their own ends. My view is .. if you want to smash some shop fronts, do it on your own day. This day was for the workers, and you took as much from them as you did from the government.

As for the policing, some people who were there have alternative views and of course there are those who disagree with the whole thing and given that we almost all have access to worldwide distribution now, some very powerful blogs as well as whole countries doing different things. Isn't it fascinating what giving the public access to distribution (the Internet) does? Here's what the network for police monitoring had to say (whoever they are). It will be really interesting to see the Liberty report .. they observed the police operational control centre for the day.

18 July 2011: the police are not going to prosecute the protestors from F&M and they admit lying to them in order to get them arrested.

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Barbara Trapido at Scarborough Literature Festival

2011-04-15: I've just had a life-changing experience at Scarborough Literature Festival.

I confess .. am I allowed to say this? I don't read a lot of fiction. I'm more of a workaholic than a novel reader, and I'm covering the festival on Twitter and Facebook .. for work. So I'm there to take photographs, tweet, keep everyone informed about the festival, and if something personally interesting happens, fabulous.

The people behind the festival were quite excited about Trapido so I popped along this morning at 10:30 to see what was up.

The way I remember the conversation that happened on stage is: diamonds floated out of Barbara Trapido's mouth.

It's almost as if, for the first time, I see the point of literature.

She struggled herself to understand what her latest book was about, Sex and Stravinsky, so she broke off to write Frankie and Stankie. Then she came back to it for a while and her husband got ill. Four years later, she came back to it again and she said (this is from memory through tears and smiles as I listened, so forgive me if I'm inaccurate, but the essence is correct) .. she had two recordings of Stravinsky and one was slow, druggy, sexy, the other not. She thought the story lay somewhere inbetween the two versions. So she had them intercut on a tape recorder and spend a month listening to it, laid down on the floor in her dressing gown.

This is a woman who has fish fingers stuck to her kitchen floor.

She writes from 4am - 8am because she's still a little dreamy, and it's before the real world wakes up. No-one knew she was writing her first novel.

I asked whether she researches for a year, then writes for a year, then publicises for a year .. what her rhythm was. Basically, there's no system. She researches after she's written. It all comes from her head. The characters constantly surprise her and when they do, she's off again exploring why that person did what they did.

She writes longhand, scribbles over it, rewrites, reads it out to tape and rewrites it back, scribbles again, talks it through into a mirror, gets it typed out, then scribbles over that. Most of the time, she's trying to make it shorter, working out what to cut.

I was sat by the exit and James Nash, the host, was gracious enough to thank me for my question. I said "that was fantastic" and he said "I know, and she doesn't realise how fabulous she is". She was behind him. He told her what I'd just said. She leaned over to me. "Is that a Ted Baker shirt?" Me: "I've no idea". Then she was off into her own experiences again .. she knew a community of immigrants who dressed smart and one of them wore a shirt just like mine.

In all that .. in all that deep, deep exploration .. that's the point.

Because in our X-Box world, what it is to be human is like a distant memory.

Barbara Trapido is what it is to be human.

And yet I don't know why. You know when someone tells a joke and you go "yeah yeah" and they tell another and it's "slightly funny, I'll give you that" and they keep going and by the end of ten minutes you're on the floor trying to work out how to keep breathing? She's like that. All unassuming, a bit dotty, takes a while to remember the name of the main character in her book. But an avalanche of feathers is still an avalanche. Stay with her, and your certainties melt away.

I've been tearful since. I feel like I went to sleep and woke up in Hanoi. She's tripped something surefooted inside me.

Cherish her.

(video)

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RIP Winnie (the cat) 1989 - 2011

2011-05-05: Winnie the horrid cat was, for most of her life, a gunslinger with the nickname Slasher Win. Faster than you, she could open one of your veins before you could blink and for nothing more than trying to stroke her, yet she was warm and purry if you dared to put your face to hers.

She came from a family who lauded Cliff Richard, and her best years were when we rented rooms in the farmhouse in Derbyshire when she'd disappear into the summer fields for days on end (unusual for a queen) and when we finally called, we'd see her bounding through the dandelions and buttercups to come home for food.

She used to ride my shoulders when we took the bins out, sat on a kitchen shelf as I cooked so I could let her smell each ingredient as I used it, and slept on my pillow at night.

We fondly remember the WTF look on her face when she, as a young cat, was sat happily in the middle of the lounge carpet when a loud and explosive bout of diarrhoea surprised her.

At some point, though, the handy side of her started, perhaps as her eyesight failed and she wasn't sure what those blurry hands were .. our other cats probably ambushed her a few too many times. She became the scary cat, the one to avoid.

We thought her overgrowing claws were due to her not going out and wearing them down, and me clipping her claws was a battle requiring real courage and more than a few wetwipes.

Slasher Win covered the bulk of her life, but more recently she mellowed. Claw clipping seemed to become a mixture of her not liking it but accepting that actually she was being cared for .. she liked padding about afterwards.

It turns out that was an early symptom of hyperthyroidism which set her metabolism on 'fast'. She started to 'wow' for food, night and day, and became an eating, pooing machine for maybe six months. The treatment would have killed her. She was so light, when I picked her up it felt like if I let her go she'd float to the ceiling.

Her poos turned to a light terracotta colour as her liver started to fail and in the last week or so she turned nice, wandering around the house to find us for cuddles. She spent yesterday on our knees, one way or another, being stroked and cuddled .. the burst of life before death.

Last night, Ali slept on the sofa near Winnie's bed .. two cushions with a heated pad on top, surrounded by a draught-excluding 'Glastonbury stage' of stiff textile, with food, water, and grass alongside on a mat so she could stand securely.

Winnie wasn't eating or drinking much any more, but she tried a few times and fell out of her bed.

This morning her breathing became erratic and, after a few gasps and a couple of muscular leg pushes and stretches, she stopped breathing, and her heart stopped a minute or two later, around 7am. Her paw twitched occasionally for ten minutes or so afterwards. Peaceful. Let's hope we all go as gently.

The other cats don't seem bothered. It's my first close-up experience of death.

What strikes me is the power of life. Winnie's will to live even though she hadn't a lot to live for, and the other cats' concentration on living, not even curiosity about Winnie's body.

So we'll be calling Elysian Fields and the vet to have her cremated and returned to us in a wooden casket (£135) *.

It's strange having a dead body in the house. When I look at her, my mind overlays movement where there is none, as if something's not right. A twitch of the ear, breathing, a stretch, a movement of whiskers.

But she is definitely dead. I picked her up to put her in a box and she was set solid in the pike position. Eyes open. I prepared the box and lay her on the open photograph of the kiss in the centre of the Guardian Royal Wedding supplement.

We will, of course, miss her, but she did separate from us so we are OK. We can simplify our arcane feeding arrangements. More than anything we are proud to have said 'no' to the vet who gave us the early option of putting down what was a nasty cat, and happy that we made her (especially last) days comfortable. Hopefully, being free from her body now, she can prance through the summer fields again.

Our neighbour called her a rebel star. She lived life her way. What more could you ask from a cat?

* As a marketing aside, that's interesting. In perhaps our favourite TV programme of all time, Green Wing, the hero tells people he's going to Elysian Fields as a roundabout way of saying he's terminally ill. We looked it up and were impressed. A little while later, we were at the vets and there was a van from Elysian Fields, so, while well disguised, we took it to be the van that collected the dead pets. Come the day, I called and favoured them. The weird and wonderful ways marketing reaches you.

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Article publishing and blogging for SEO

2011-07-26: Here's an interesting effect I've noticed.

Basically, all things being equal, bigger websites get ranked higher in Google. Very simply, that's because every page on a big site is more likely to be born with many inbound links (from other pages on the site). Whereas if I start a new blog "John's interesting stories about cheese" .. I'll have to work to get my first link.

For a particular client who had the normal "we do this" and "we also do this" type website, I reported that, basically, they weren't writing about what people who wanted their stuff were searching for. That's almost always true, before you start sniggering at the back.

So I proposed that we work out some keyphrases they could write about that people were searching on and where the competition wasn't too hot, then between us we'd write one article a week and go through a routine to get it published and linked to and so on.

That routine has been running now for maybe three or four months and we are getting into a rhythm. We pick up the next keyphrase. We notice we are nowhere in search for that phrase. We write and publish an article. A couple of weeks later we are at position maybe 15 or so for that phrase.

So that's all great, non-company-name search traffic is up 35% month on month.

But the question arises: how do we get onto page one of Google? More to the point for the client, how can we do that within the agreed budget?

Well, it's a new routine so we will get more efficient at it.

But I noticed .. the position of the older articles in a Google search for our target keyphrases are still rising. About 10% improvement every 10 days at the moment.

So as it stands, the system looks like it will deliver first page search positions in due course even if we don't change anything. That's partly because every new article we add gets and gives links.

My main message with SEO is: SEO is for life. It's about finding things you can do that don't mess up your days, that you can afford, that build your brand, that people are interested in, and that (obviously) improve your position in the search engines .. always remembering that your competition is doing the same so you have to outrun them. But the key thing is: find something that works and keep doing it. It's nice to see some simple evidence that it pays off.

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Here's a Twitter strategy that didn't work

2011-11-03: I've been publicising Musicport this year, partly using Twitter and a week or two before the festival someone got excited about it, started to get involved, and became a very prolific Musicport advocate online.

My style is a bit more understated, particularly with this festival where people who are serious about good music come to experience their favourite artists and discover new ones.

One strategy this person adopted was to ask people to RT, re-tweet, a message like "@yourName PLS RT Amazing talent from all around the world at @MusicportFest this weekend. Details at .. ". This was sent to musicians like Boy George, the local football team, and a Yorkshire tourism site.

None of them re-tweeted it. Why not?

A re-tweet, if you don't know, means: imagine I sell quality beds and I'm on Twitter and have 100 people following what I write because they are thinking of buying a good bed. I also follow people, so when I log in to Twitter, I see the things written by the people I follow.

Now, if I see something written by someone I follow that I think might be interesting to the people who follow me because they are interested in buying a luxury bed, I'll re-tweet it, which means that tweet becomes visible to all my followers, usually with 'RT' somewhere so people know I've re-tweeted it, and the originator's Twitter handle.

That's great, now my followers might follow the originator of that tweet, and I've been useful to my following with just a click of a button.

So what's happening here? I'm curating my own timeline for my followers. I'm creating a useful stream of information in the hope that I will generate goodwill among my followers.

I may also wish to foster goodwill with the person I am re-tweeting. Perhaps I think we can do more business together. Perhaps it would be nice if they re-tweeted me once in a while to their followers.

It means I endorse what I've re-tweeted. It comes with my blessing.

If I'm really professional at this, I know what sort of tweets cause people to unfollow me, and which ones get re-tweeted or commented upon.

So, what was wrong with the strategy of asking those people to RT the message about Musicport?

First off, I think it has a salesy style, so it looks just like an ad. Would you re-tweet an ad to your followers? Social media is no place for pushy sales messages. It's where real people gather.

Secondly, this person has done nothing for the people they are asking for a re-tweet from. Social media is a little like banking used to be. First you make deposits, then you can take out a loan. So .. first, you do favours for others, or at least interact with them and build a relationship. Then maybe you can ask for a re-tweet, but better if the re-tweet is freely given to you because that person feels they want to return a favour or be nice to you.

Thirdly .. if you don't understand the person you are asking for a re-tweet, you will go down in their estimation. So, whoever runs Bridlington Town AFC probably looked at that request and thought "we're a football club, not a music one". Although, yes, some of their followers may be into football and music, that doesn't really matter. They are following BridTownAFC for football news about BridTownAFC, not about music or the writer's favourite cheese. They may be interested in the weather, or roadworks, but only in so far as they affect BridTownAFC games.

If I, as Musicport, write to BridTownAFC to ask for a retweet, the BridTownFC person is going to think "well, the Musicport chap doesn't understand what I'm doing here, he must be a prat". So .. that would be damaging. If, however, Musicport might affect parking around BridTownAFC's game on Saturday, and I connected with BridTownAFC to say so .. I'll go up massively in their estimation and may get a link from it.

The crucial feeling is that of curator. On Twitter, everyone can have a 'following' and there's a feeling of ownership or care that goes with that. It may be there naturally, or it may be beaten into you by the criticism and praise you get along the way.

As Musicport, I followed BridTownAFC. They didn't follow back. That's hint enough for me. But .. they are in my timeline, so if anything pops up that gives me a way to help them, to add value to their Twitter stream in some way, I'll do that.

A few decades ago a meme passed around that doing business in the middle east was strange because you don't sell. You build a relationship. You share coffee. They invite you somewhere. You invite them for dinner. You build a friendship and never once talk business. Then one day they pat you on the back and say "talk to my brother, he's looking for what you do". All that dancing? They were scoping you out, checking you won't let them down, making sure your character suits and your politics fits.

Social media is like that. So be nice. And don't push. Show you understand. Give. It makes the world a nicer place. And if you're going to Tweet .. be interesting (then people might RT you).

Musicport is MusicportFest on Twitter, follow us there if you're interested, I'll be tweeting 'live' from Musicport this weekend including 'live' video so .. should be interesting.

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Graphic designer rudely wastes 280 minutes of my life

2011-08-31: I've just taken on the maintenance of a nice looking website.

And it's just taken me and a graphic designer 280 minutes in total to change a headline.

Websites are supposed to be text. If this were text, it would have taken me seconds.

Clearly someone somewhere thought the text wasn't pretty enough, so the designer of the day played a popular trick. It's possible to create the headline of a website in text, just like Google wants, then offset it 3 miles to the left so it will never be displayed, and put a graphic in its place. We see the graphic, Google sees the text, everyone's happy.

A year down the line, the graphic designer is off 3 miles to the right and the website comes to me for maintenance. What font is that? What colour is that? There are no comments in the code to tell me what's going on. I need the original multilayered graphic file from the designer before I can start. The headline Google sees is different to the headline we see on screen.

The font he's used isn't owned by my graphic designer, $199 to buy it.

And when it's all done, it's not as usable. If I'm partially sighted, I can't make a graphic bigger so I can read it. As a web developer if I want the graphic more than 250 pixels wide, I can't, so I have to find a short headline that doesn't quite describe the content.

That's seriously annoying. For Internet marketers, headlines are key. When you land on a page, the headline is powerful in deciding whether you stay or leave. 250 pixels. About 11 letters.

So, graphic designer. You, for your love of prettiness, tied my hands. It looks nice, but it doesn't work. You wasted my time. You disrespected people who aren't as visually able as you. You made a webpage with limits.

Don't get me wrong. I love design. I just don't like it taking precedence over usability and maintainability.

That pretty headline doesn't look so pretty in red on your P&L.

Here's what I aim for.

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A quick SEO for SME case study with ROI calc

2011-08-06: Here's a quick case study for my search engine optimisation (SEO) involvement with a company that sells a subscription product at $15 a month (ignoring upsells that could be quite lucrative).

SEO is the generally accepted (but controversial) term for improving your web presence (website and other things like Twitter) so that you rank higher in Google for relevant searches by prospects who might want to buy what you sell.

It's something you can do continually, and you should if your market is competitive. But this project was for a short period.

It's not a showoff story, nobody's driving a Ferrari by the end, it's just a peek inside the basic financial argument of everyday business-building SEO for a small business or SME.

This client is already well embedded in a community and gets many of its sales through word of mouth and simply being known, but at the same time there is plenty of opportunity to reach people who aren't deeply involved in the scene, those who simply type their requirements into Google and want a solution.

My initial involvement was just for an hour a week for ten weeks and we covered on-page optimisation (the words on the website) as well as off-site optimisation and link-building. Not in any major way (10 hours doesn't allow for that), but enough to see a threefold rise in traffic from Google. That traffic also converted well, better than overall site traffic, and three times better than traffic that came direct to the site.

Normally Google is the biggest source of traffic to a site. In this case, it's the community. But I got Google to be their second best source of new business.

Interestingly, Google traffic was more tentative, wanting to see the stats and data before pressing a [buy] button on that page. Visitors from community sites seemed to be pre-sold, simply pressing the [buy] button on the home page.

Anyway, I worked out the break even point on this client's investment in my SEO, and it's 6 months.

So in month 1 let's lump all my costs there, $652, and he made 4 extra sales so got an extra $60 in sales. Let's assume a 50% markup, so after costs he had $30 spare, so his bank was down by $622.

In month 2 and thereafter, I did nothing, so now he has 8 new clients, $60 of additional profit to offset my costs and his bank is only down $562.

In month 7 he's up by $210 profit, and his bank is $188 in the black.

By month 12 he's up by $360 profit in that month, and his bank is better by $1,688, here's the basic spreadsheet. So he invested $622 and turned it into $1,688 plus his initial punt in just a year. After a second year he'd have an extra $8,348 in the bank.

In terms of marketing being ballpark 10% of turnover, I reach that after about 14 months.

That's ignoring upsells and any dissatisfied customers who leave .. but he doesn't get any of the latter.

So, that's all fine and dandy, but actually Google is still the source of only 22% of his new clients, the rest come from other places so my next task is conversion.

If I can improve his website conversion, lets say by 25%, then he'll get another 9 clients per month. The third worksheet on that spreadsheet shows the predicted effect after a year if we could achieve that. Basically it turns an investment of $1,118 into $5,235 in a year.

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The looters and the mercenaries

2011-08-11: Here's where I'm at with the looting thing.

Those who looted were clearly in the wrong. They were purely out for themselves. They are not all poor and disadvantaged, the only thing they seem to share is a lack of understanding and empathy with the values that most of us share: it's good to be constructive with our time and to help others. Most of the time, that means gaining skills, getting work, and helping to build a better future. For most of us it's really hard to imagine being like those people.

However

I am more scared by friends and colleagues on Facebook calling for the looters to be shot, for mercenaries to be employed, for the women rioters to be sterilised. Those are real comments from people I've connected with. God knows what others are saying.

For me, that's an equal mind-crime, and it can't be excused by 'heat of the moment' because if that excuses the shooting, it also excuses the looting. Also, frankly, I'm no holier, I have called for a bit of sharia-style hand-lopping for litterers before now, within the safe walls of Facebook.

The looter fails to empathise and understand a shopkeeper's life's work and the consequence of wrecking a business and burning a home.

The person who says "shoot them" fails to understand that the looter in this moment may also be a son, father, wife, or carer the rest of the time.

The solution is complex, so the urge to find a simple solution has to be resisted. The cause is everything everyone has said .. parenting, education, our acquisitive culture, violent games, lack of community, having supports taken away, lack of job prospects, gangs, drugs .. all of it.

The looters weren't born looters, something happened to them along the way. We had a hand in that something.

I'm still deeply affected by the closing message from Adam Curtis' All Watched Over By Machines Of Loving Grace. The dream was to create machines that looked out for us. But the machines are not the danger, we are. Our DNA is our software. We are the machines out to promote our own genes over others'. We are programmed to dislike those unlike ourselves, those with genes unlike ours. In an increasingly connected world, we have to find ways to rise above that.

That doesn't mean loving the looter. But it does mean recognising that we can't kill people, or even jail them, just because we don't understand them, because they are different. The test for this generation is to understand people who are very different to us, because the world is getting smaller and faster. It starts with .. if you were born in Tottenham with those genes and that family .. would it be you being jailed today? It could be that simple .. just chance. Lucky that you weren't, isn't it?

So this isn't about the looters and what we want done to them. It's about us and our reaction to it all.

For me it starts with a family I travelled back on the train with the other day. Mother, father, and three kids. They could talk well enough. They were pleasant. But when they left their seats, they made no effort at all to pick up their litter.

I know there's no litter bin on a train station, but I took mine .. I always take mine .. because I wanted the next person who sat at my seat to have a pleasant journey. Those parents didn't think of that, or didn't care about that. Their kids will think that's normal.

So I'm doing as I always do, and looking to myself. What can I do?

Because at the end of it all, we only really control ourselves. So it's not about what the government should do to stop it happening again (that's for them to decide and us to judge in the ballot box). It's about what I can do for my community. It can be as simple as a hello and a smile. We can all do that. Can't we?

Some interesting articles on it all.

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Interesting Twitter account

2011-04-12: After Psychotherapy is an interesting Twitter account .. why? Because he posts automatically every 7 minutes 24/7, and I haven't unfollowed him yet.

Anyone else posting that frequently, for instance Chefstales, gets unfollowed pretty quickly. Chefstales feels needy, to me and the tips obvious, ie. not real chefs tips at all but common knowledge home cookery techniques. Afterpsy5 feels helpful, interesting. If I click on a link I almost always read the whole article.

So, how many articles are there on the After Psychotherapy website? Only 109 according to Yahoo!. So maybe I haven't followed or read very many, as to me, every post seems new.

Yet, looking at the history, it's just an automatic posting system that works its way through the list. It seems to have hit a sweet spot where there's very likely to be an update from afterpsy5 on my Twitter page at any one time, and I don't mind.

Is there an afterpsy? And an afterpsy1? Yes .. all the way up to afterpsy6. All with about 12,000 followers and having dispensed about 22,000 tweets. At 1 every 7 minutes that's only 107 days and I feel I've known about this account for longer than that.

But anyway, on the face of it and overall, there are 72,000 followers in the system being brought to a Wordpress blog containing 109 articles, with some outbound links to other blogs. There's nothing overtly salesy going on, although he may be increasing his kudos, his worth to publishers, as a talking head, as an expert.

Each account appears to follow as many accounts as it is followed by. It appears to be set up automatically to follow back anyone who follows, so the followers could have been grown organically, and perhaps there's a following engine working away in the background too. Perhaps anytime someone tweets 'stress', and a load of other keyphrases, they get followed by afterpsy.

But what interests me is that it seems useful, the blogs are good, and I haven't been irritated by it yet.

It's easily done. 109 articles .. well, if you wrote one a day you'd be done in under four months. One every Sunday morning .. just a couple of years.

The following systems and auto posting take a short while to set up. After that the whole thing is automated. Although the subtle refinement of the system suggests that at the very least it's been set up by someone who knows what they are doing, but it could also be being managed very well: if we tweet every 6 minutes versus every 8 minutes what happens? Which titles work best? Which tweets lose us followers? What words trigger retweets?

72,000 followers. So if he runs that for a year or so and then brings out a book .. might 1% buy it? An eBook at say £4.99 would bring in about £3,500. Not a fortune, but it's a start.

Most such systems provide a few subtle ways for people to pay money. From 'buy me a coffee' systems to book sales, email list subscription (which then provides multiple ideas of things to buy), through to full sales of maybe a subscription site, consultancy or whatever.

It all comes back to the main thing to learn from this. The style. Non-salesy. Informative. Gentle. Welcoming.

The tweets, not '10 ways to', but 'what happens when?'.

I like it.

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So what about this SEO guy who will get 500 quality links for £100 a month and will get me on page one?

2011-04-13: Let's nail this once and for all.

To Google, it's worth $22bn per year to provide excellent search results to each and every query users throw at it. Their whole business is based on providing the very best search results because the day they don't is the day everyone leaves and their business collapses.

That's $60m per day, $2.5m per hour, $700 per second of motivation. And they are very, very .. very .. clever.

So, put aside that idea that you have of tricking Google into doing anything. There are no tricks that will work for long. Google saw all the tricks coming years ago.

First page of Google

If you want a first page ranking on Google, it is actually very easy .. for a worthless search phrase that no-one buys from.

So when someone says "I can get you a number one position within a week", the point is .. it's for a worthless phrase.

Here's why.

The first page of Google is a free market. People want to be on the first page of Google because they make money from it. People click through to their website and one way or another they make money from that.

So what's it worth, to be on the front page of Google? Well, if, by being in position five of Google you'd make £1,000 of profit each month, would you spend £500 per month to your SEO person?

No?

Well your competitors might.

And when your competitor is making that £500 of profit each month from this one phrase .. well, that's still an opportunity for someone else.

If they are willing to spend £600 a month and take £400 a month profit, particularly if they can knock the other guy out of business and eventually settle with more profit, that's a business opportunity.

So .. how much to get on page one of Google? It's whatever the business is worth.

It has to be that, because if the £100 a month chap we started with could get you to page one for a profitable phrase, then anyone can do that. And anyone can't because there are only ten slots on page one. So once ten people have done it, you'll need something else, something extra.

That's the reality of SEO. Two rules apply:

"if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is"

and Johnny's rule:

"everything is as complicated as it's humanly possible to be"

If there was a simple thing you could do to get on page one, everyone would do it, and it would no longer work (because there are only ten slots).

Web 2.0 and the rise of social media

Trite, I know, but the Internet and the web gave us all a distribution channel previously available only to powerful people like newspaper owners and TV channels.

Web 2.0, the rise of social media, turned that right up. So now, everyone is familiar with populating the web themselves, whether it's about the lovely pizza they've just eaten, the bad service they just got, or their plans for the week or weekend through Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, blogs, Flickr and the rest.

It's no exaggeration to say this is revolutionary.

Your business exists in a new world where your customers have as much voice as you do. You can't fight that. You have to embrace it.

Here's an attempt Seabrook Crisps' Facebook Page.

What do you think?

They have 3,398 fans, so what about Ben and Jerry's. OK, about quarter of a million fans.

Note that these pages are open to comment from everyone. That's your page, open to comment from everyone. Scary eh?

I don't know about you but I find Seabrook's approach a little patronising. Perhaps they are appealing to kids, but Ben and Jerry's (and I know they are now owned by Unilever but I imagine they keep at least some of the awesome original branding) seems more genuine.

The Ben and Jerry's brand was what? For me it was amazing stories about ice cream tasting sessions, employees being able to invent flavours as they wished, natural and great quality ingredients, massive customer involvement, and .. an ice cream revolution everyone could get involved in that was really great fun.

Stories are important. Viral. Ancient.

I probably haven't eaten any Ben and Jerry's for years, but I love what they stand for. So it even reached me .. and I'm not really their cinemagoing, sofa DVD watching market. Ben and Jerry's isn't patronising. It's fabulous.

Google wants to see a balanced website that's continually maintained with external links from all sorts of areas that look like genuine customer involvement. So .. you'd better get some genuine customer involvement.

It's an attention economy

Nowadays we are used to being bombarded by thousands of messages which we ignore.

Interestingly, filtering software, like Facebook, that gives us more of what we want only makes it worse. I personally have an interest in Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, but I even filter out lots of that. Even powerful, focused messages get ignored. We are very, very good nowadays at ignoring what we are not interested in right this second.

The web is a goal-focussed environment after all. It's not like watching telly and sitting through the ads. We drive the web. When we use the web, we use it to do something. When an ad or other message gets in our way, we route around it. We want what we want. The web is like a cash machine .. we just want what we want from it.

Equally, as marketing becomes more sophisticated, we become more adept at spotting when we are being sold to. If we didn't, we'd be bust. This is life and death stuff. We have to spot sales and deal with it accordingly.

So that audience of yours with its global voice: it's not stupid. It also knows what you're up to.

Try commenting in a forum. You will be slaughtered if there's even a subliminal whiff of anything commercial.

So now. Do you fancy spamming them? That guy who will get you 500 quality links with a software robot for £100 a month. Is he going to improve your brand or make you look like a salesman in a cheap suit? Once you look like that, your brand image changes. People remember these things, especially if they actually rather like your brand. So you could really spoil things with your key supporters.

So here's how I do it

So if the answer isn't ramping up the automated SEO software .. "shall we go with the guy who offers 500 or the one who offers 1,000? Oh, 1,000 is bigger, let's go with him" .. what is the answer?

It comes from a common Twitter strategy. How do you get Twitter followers? Answer: one relationship at a time.

Boring. One? Yes one genuine, real relationship with someone who can be your advocate.

Social media blurs the boundary between you and your customers. Now you have customers who will comment on your new packaging, flavour, product or outlet. They will let you and all your friends know if your customer service sucks. They'll help you get it right. Use that.

It's no longer about you and them. The company sending out press releases and messages that your customers consume. It's about interaction, relationships, conversation.

That's what's missing. That's what will set you apart. Soul. Real connections.

And what are people connecting with when they connect with you? Your brand, and the people within your company who live that brand.

Your brand differentiates you in the market. Your brand values are how you live, as a company, every day. It's in everything you do.

So the first thing I need to understand is your brand, because that determines everything you do.

I'll need to know who's involved in the company, and who I can work with who is already enthusiastic about this stuff who can become an advocate in your business for social media.

I'll need to do some number crunching to see what relevant search terms are entered into Google by your audience. I'll need to see your Analytics figures to see how people behave on your website already. I'll work out which search terms are making money for you. I'll need to know as far as possible where you are making profit.

I'll look at your competitors and work out their strength in each of your markets. I'll forensically analyse their strategies and see what we can use.

And I'll need to know your strengths. What can you bring? Do you write well? Got good photographs? Video? Is there already a news system? Do you have people able to monitor Twitter? Are your sales people willing to bring input? What's your website like? One of my clients found out one of their receptionists was actually a trained journalist .. she writes fabulous copy to this day, every day.

Having done all that, I'll make some initial recommendations about where the easiest next income streams might be and how we can develop systems to take advantage of that, systems that we can optimise and internalise as much as you like once we've proved they work.

I can promose you something. Those systems will not be boring. They won't be me-too. I won't patronise your customers. I want you to take your brand values and live them to the extreme in everything you do. What would your brand do if it was really free?

As we run those systems we can monitor progress against your competitors.

It's possible do work on SEO and see no results if your competitors are doing more. So by making a good initial guess at how much resource to put in and then monitoring progress against the competition, we can see whether we are gaining on your competition or not and adjust the system accordingly.

Of course, if they are well managed they will see you coming and raise their game to protect their income, their jobs, their families. Money is serious stuff.

Have you got enough resource to storm your competitors' castles? They are, after all, funding their defence of their page one position with the income they are getting every day from that position. Once you are in position one, it's easier to stay there. So .. that's where you want to be, defending, spending less, rather than fighting up from below.

If you are low on resources we can pick our battles. It will take a fortune to get to number one for 'car insurance', but less to get there for 'car insurance broker Wolverhampton'. But once you've got the latter, maybe you can go for 'midlands' and work up, using some of your new income to fund bigger battles.

Another way forward is .. if your website converts better than your competitors', you will make more money than they do for the same volume of traffic. So website conversion, another specialism of mine, is key to funding the whole thing.

At the end of all this, you get a page one position, perhaps a number one position, for a phrase, and you get income from that. I like to think of that as a spinning plate on a pole. I guess that shows the size of my maturity.

Once you have one revenue stream, you'll want another, and another. Each one picked because it's winnable and it's right for you. Achieved with a customised system that plays to your strengths.

Each win makes the next win easier. Every achieved keyphrase number one position raises all boats.

Notice I haven't promised you anything? That's because I don't know you yet. How long is a piece of string? My answers are customised every time, but they are based on a deep knowledge of how this all works.

I ran a PR company for ten years and worked in marketing, PR and direct mail for twenty. So I know marketing.

I have a first class degree in Internet computing, so I know the Internet.

I'm trained by the best .. Stompernet .. in Internet marketing.

So what I don't do is take what you tell me and push it through robot software.

And I'll beat those methods every time with insightful systems that play to your strengths.

Because the battle is partly about resources, and partly about doing the right things.

This is as hard as humanly possible. It has to be, otherwise we'd all be on page one, and we can't be. Don't let anyone tell you it's easy. The principles are simple enough. So is kicking a ball in the back of a net. But being a championship footballer isn't easy.

This is the right way to do Internet marketing. Professional. Following the money. Using science and the numbers to guide us, but also psychology, soul and enthusiasm.

Your business exists to make a difference. So let's make that difference.

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Andy's nice but Brian isn't

2011-09-02: Our survival depends on assumptions. Shortcuts. Generalisations. We make snap judgments based on general ideas when we meet new people, otherwise we could get robbed, taken for a ride, or miss an opportunity.

I've just spent maybe 20 or 30 hours over maybe a couple of months fixing the computer of someone I didn't know.

We've orbited each other, though, over the years. He's a musician and I'm a musician. We've played the same festivals.

I believe he's played and supported a lot of charities and good causes in his lifetime. So I felt good things towards him, despite us never having met.

His friend contacted me and asked if I knew anyone who could help him speed up his computer. I volunteered because I wanted to get to know this chap.

It turns out his setup was the same as that of a friend of mine, who also wanted computer help. I say 'no' to him, because I perceive him as being tight, not wanting to spend money. Him having a hooky copy of XP is because (I assume) he's tight. Him using me for free, that's tight. The musician chap .. that was probably just ignorance.

OK, now move that into social media.

I perceive that the musician chap has poured good into the world. I wanted to get to know him, and to help him now he needed something back.

They say of social media that you have to invest in the favour bank before you can withdraw anything.

I think even that is too analytical.

You have to genuinely give. OK, you don't give away everything, but if you help, people will remember you.

In an attention economy, that's important.

Incidentally, at the same festival I mentioned, the band allocated our dressing room before us left it in a complete state. So much so we felt we couldn't enter because we would have had to rudely clear their things away. Guess how we feel about them. Equity theory applies. Think I'm going to ever help them? Not a chance.

Social media isn't a megaphone. It's a place full of people, and sometimes you can help someone. Do it. It'll make for a beautiful world.

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ME/CFS XMRV Bloggerama day

2011-01-21: It's XMRV Bloggerama day (whatever that is) and so everyone with ME/CFS is encouraged to write a blog. I'm a blogger, and my partner has ME/CFS so .. I shall.

I don't know how much of what follows is actually true, but this is how it feels, and this blog comes to you today care of the letter W for Wessely, triggered by this BBC story about Gulf War Syndrome.

I'm not any more familiar with Gulf War Syndrome than anyone else, but a quick look at Wikipedia reveals the line "Approximately 250,000[4] of the 697,000 veterans who served in the 1991 Gulf War are afflicted with enduring chronic multi-symptom illness, a condition with serious consequences." .. that [4] being a citation to the Office of National Statistics. So where I thought Gulf War Syndrome affected some of those who served in the first gulf war, I had no idea it affected more than a third of them.

At the bottom of the BBC story are some comments by Professor Simon Wessely, director of the King's Centre for Military Health Research in London and an adviser to the Ministry of Defence. The article states that "He does not believe Gulf War Syndrome exists as a distinct illness".

We have to be careful here, because one of the goals of a newspaper is to get you to react. What's going on here, I think, is detailed in this article about the difference between a disease and a syndrome: basically a disease is something with a known cause and course, whereas a syndrome is a collection of symptoms that are known commonly to occur together but for which there is no known cause. So to be fair to Wessely, being a professor, I think he will be using very specific terms that mean a lot to his peers but which mean different things in common usage and the BBC is using that to wind us up.

Now, I used to be involved in the protests against genetically modified foods and what I learned there is that spokespeople will turn up and say something like "there is absolutely no evidence that genetically modified crops will cause any harm to wildlife". What they mean is, no-one has studied that. And no-one has studied it because there's no money in so doing. What we want to hear is "the effect on wildlife has been extensively studied, and we know there is no effect".

So, here we go with Gulf War Syndrome, from the same BBC article: "An MoD spokeswoman told BBC News: 'We have long accepted that some veterans of the Gulf conflict are ill and that some of this ill health may be related to their Gulf service. The UK and the US have undertaken a substantial amount of research into Gulf veterans' illness. The research has indicated that there is no illness which is specific to Gulf veterans.'"

OK, that does say there's research, but clearly there is insufficient research to work out what caused Gulf War Syndrome. We know there is gravity, we just haven't done enough research to be able to say with certainty what gravity is. That doesn't mean gravity doesn't exist, it means more work needs to be done.

Again from the BBC article, "Sue Freeth, director of welfare at the Royal British Legion, fears 'A lot of veterans, because they haven't been able to find treatment, have decided to stop looking because they think nobody cares any more. Some of them are getting support from their GPs or their Primary Care Trusts but certainly some veterans we talk to are not getting any support unless they can pay for it privately.'"

So, as an aside, everyone still happy with funding going to GPs?

Here's what I've been working towards, from that article: "I don't think we're ever going to be able to take it any further now," says Professor Simon Wessely. "Even if you gave me £10m [for research], I wouldn't know what to do with it."

Great.

The ME/CFS link? Wessely is a government advisor on ME/CFS and devised the graded exercise programme that doesn't work and was widely implemented. Wessely's central premise is that ME/CFS is primarily a psychiatric illness (which is how the NHS treats it, based on his recommendations). The people he accepts as having ME/CFS into his trials probably haven't got it, they have mental illnesses. They then get better on graded exercise and hey presto, Wessely has a cure for ME/CFS. It's a circular system based on his disagreement about what ME/CFS is.

The Canadian Consensus Definition is the best way to determine whether someone has ME/CFS or not. Wessely doesn't use that.

So, anyone see any links here? Could it possibly be that Wessely's research department and career is somehow funded by interests that would rather not either pay out damages to people suffering from Gulf War Syndrome or ME/CFS or fund effective NHS treatment?

So, no-one with money wants to find a cause or cure for ME/CFS because the cure costs. Enter Annette and Harvey Whittemore and their daughter, Andrea Whittemore-Goad. She has ME/CFS, and her parents had $5m to spend so they set up the Whittemore Petersen Institute (WPI) and four years later announced they had found an association between ME/CFS and XMRV, a human retrovirus. There are only three other human retroviruses, two are herpes and HIV, the other causes cancer.

In the UK, we love our NHS. Free healthcare, wonderful. But to be honest, the shine is a little less glossy for me now I'm trying to do the best thing with ME/CFS because I'm reading Osler's Web: Inside the Labyrinth of the Chronic Fatigue Syndrome Epidemic and what's become clear is this .. ME/CFS was first spotted and investigated in a wealthy area of the US where the population could afford all the tests there were, and the clinics had all the equipment they needed.

In the NHS, the treatment is basic. The Canadian Consensus lists (from memory) a full page of tests that they recommend are done, almost none of which have been in my partner's case. I'm guessing if we went private and had the money, we could pay for all those tests. But still, tests are one thing, a treatment or cure is another, and you can test all you like but unless there's something you can do about what you find, perhaps it's all in vain. So we sit and wait and we hope as hard as we can that the WPI makes further progress.

Now, we know the way science works. If I say I dropped an apple and it hit me on the foot so there must be this thing called gravity associated with large objects, it needs other scientists to also drop apples on their foot to prove that what I observed is consistently repeatable, and if so others devise other experiments where they, for instance, measure the time it takes for an apple and a lead ball of the same size to fall to the ground, then whizz off to the moon, and work out how long it takes there, then they work it all out to come up with a model or formula, then other scientists repeat exactly that to prove it works for them too and then they stretch the formula to try to find some way that it doesn't work, then they get all excited about that.

So, the WPI announced the link between XMRV and ME/CFS and other laboratories set about repeating it and guess what? Many found no link. "Ah", say the vested interests, "thank goodness, it was all a storm in a tea cup, the WPI were wrong, keep calm and carry on".

But what's this? At least one of the studies was by Wessely's team and frankly .. I'll be blunt, I know you can take it .. I can drive a double decker bus through Wessely's methodology. But hey, who am I? He's the big professor. Do politicians know about research methodology? Thatcher might have but otherwise, I think not. So they'll listen to Wessely and, his way's cheaper anyway so all's well.

I've not seen a refuting study that has anything close to the quality of the original WPI one.

Now .. perhaps the WPI institute had to come up with something fabulous in order to gain funds for further research. Maybe they sexed it up a little. Who really knows?

But here's what I do know.

ME/CFS doesn't tend to strike the faint hearted. Those afflicted are people who had passion in their hearts, determination, they worked hard, pushed themselves .. they were going somewhere, they were going to make a difference.

So when ME/CFS is cured, that will be a story, all those fabulous, capable, strong and fearless people back in circulation, realising their potential.

What's got me foxed, though, is how best to bring that day forward. Of course, I care for my partner in the medium term. I guess if the WPI come up with an effective treatment, that will shake things up, so we could help them with whatever, funding or expertise. If we can get Wessely out of his position that would be a start but I fear the system would create Wessely II.

There are 250,000 people with CFS here in the UK, that's 4 in every thousand people, so 27.5m worldwide assuming it's evenly spread. The capitalism model would say someone, somewhere will see that as a market need worth pursuing. I guess the WPI does. So that's the capitalist solution. But capitalism also gave us the Lightning Process which bows not to science, preferring to serve only the easily bemused, persuade them they're not ill, and then gag them if it still doesn't work, allegedly.

Out of interest, I liked the NHS and NICE. I'd have liked NICE to have funded research into cures for long term debilitating illnesses. Nationalised medical research. It would save on the incapacity benefit bill.

So there. I don't know what the solution is. All I have is hope at the moment, and right now, it's all vested in the WPI. I love them. But a very tiny part of me is braced to discover that they are not 'true' either.

If anyone's got a better idea than helping the WPI and hoping, do please let me know.

Meanwhile we're not in pain (many with fibromyalgia are in constant pain), and it's lovely to walk slowly and watch the spring buds.

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Just a couple of ideas

2010-08-28: Just a quick blog to record a couple of ideas.

I just retweeted "ewanmcintosh Film I'm involved with reaches BBC Breakfast. Like Northern Soul music? Like SoulBoy: http://bbc.in/ci6tH7 #soul #northernsoul #music" (I'd like to know more about Northern Soul) and immediately it got retweeted by "breakfast_bot RT @JohnAllsoppIM RT @ewanmcintosh: Film I'm involved with reaches BBC Breakfast. Like Northern Soul... http://bit.ly/a16cvl , yum, i hope!".

I guess BreakfastBot watches out for any mention of Breakfast and retweets it take a look. Actually, I thought it was the BBC Breakfast team making public the public reaction to their programme, which is kinda cool and would give them a stream of inbound links too. I like that idea. As it stands maybe it's owned by someone who has a breakfast sausage to sell.

OK, here's the biggy. Not yet convinced about online video? Polycell. They sell you the product and you can see a video that shows you how to use it. Fabulous.

Just one thing dammit! That same old problem is still there. It's still everywhere. It's sorted by product category.

If you are going to run expensive ads showing youngish people who don't know how to fill cracks in their walls, they don't know if they want a filler or a decorating aid. What they know is, they have a crack in their wall.

People are goal oriented online. They'll search for "repair crack in wall" and buy the solution they find. They won't search for 'filler' if they don't know that's what they need. If they see the ad and go to the Polycell website, they won't want to click around trying to work out whether it's a filler or a decorating aid that they want.

Golden rule: no-one cares how you categorise your products. Sort your website according to the problems people are having. Completely forget your product categories.

So, I would rip out the products part of the site and instead list common problems (written from the user's point of view) and their solutions with the video and the product. I'd watch the traffic to those problems and only display the 80:20 pareto top ones on page one, but have further pages that cover everything else.

My 2p worth, but if they are targeting DIY novices, I bet that would seriously improve conversion. Mind-you, I don't know how they'd measure that since they are not selling off the page, but guiding people to their nearest stockist (that works well). They could give people a printout 50p-off voucher or similar and track that back, but in doing so they'd probably eat up all their profits. I'm guessing the goal would have to be getting someone to add a product to their shopping list (nice), and using the store locator.

Anyway, don't forget: video. Video video video video. Did I mention how important video is? Video video video. Think video. Do video. Do it now. Do video today. Like .. stop reading (after the next sentences) and then do some video. And the golden rule, write for your visitor and don't imagine for a second (unless you are Aston Martin or Madonna with enthusiastic fans) anyone cares about your product lines. They just want a solution to their problem. Cheers. Cya.

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Our narrowboat plan

2010-08-13: This idea of living on a narrowboat doesn't seem to go away, in fact it keeps getting closer. Here's how the interior might plan out: click for a bigger view.

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Weave art into your marketing

2011-04-20: One of the things I try to encourage companies to do is to weave art into their marketing.

Artists are adept at realising interesting ideas and are always looking for funding, and businesses need to stand out in an increasingly busy world, so for me, this is an obvious match.

Here's an example .. not mine, sadly. Take a look at the stand (most of the way down the page) for Vicky's Bread.

How good is that? Seriously. It's mad, of course. But what would visitors to that show remember? It calls you like a siren.

The key is to match arts activities with your brand values, so if you're exciting, do something exciting. If you're strong do something strong. If you're reliable do something reliable. Check out your local arts community.

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The Birthday Party at Leeds Warehouse in 1982

2010-08-18: Back when I was first a student (Computer Science, Leeds University) I used to photograph bands, so I thought I'd put up some of the pics. I make no claims to their greatness, but I enjoyed taking them and developing them in the darkroom and maybe others might like them too.

Anyway, this is Nick Cave and Mick Harvey of The Birthday Party playing, I think, Leeds Warehouse on the 6 May 1982 (according to this).

The place was full and I got right to the front, Nick Cave sat on my shoulder at one point. When the set ended, someone made a grab for Rowland Howards' effects pedals. When the band came back onstage for their encore, they asked for the doors to be closed and for the thief to hand them back in but afaik they didn't get them back so we got no encore and there was much disappointment all round. I regret not being fast enough with the camera to take the shot of him nicking them. Mind, it wouldn't really have helped because it would have been a few hours before I could have processed the film :-)

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Is Julian Assange the new Ghandi?

2010-10-25:

The truth is out there, and the thing about information is .. it gets around. One day, one way, it gets out.

The publication of 391,832 reports forming The Iraq War Logs near comprehensively documents the war and occupation in Iraq, revealing previously secret details of events as seen and heard by the US military troops on the ground in Iraq. (Guardian, UN calls for investigation)

These are the actions of US and sometimes British power overseas, taken in our name, paid for with our taxes, but kept secret from us not because they are unsavoury .. war is certainly that .. but because within those records are unconscionable acts that don't support the image our governments want us to have about our armed forces.

Remember, in Britain at least, all the recent 'respect for the military' stuff is consciously created PR.

I'm not saying we shouldn't respect our military, I really do. But wouldn't it be better if we could be confident that our forces really did live up to the high standards we think are in place?

Assange doesn't necessarily run Wikileaks, he's just the one with his head above the parapet, but I see real bravery there. I don't know much about Ghandi, but I can't get away from the idea that Assange is breaking seriously new ground in this information age and I see him as Ghandi-esque, putting his life on the line for principles that affect us all. Watch the campaign against him as a troublemaker grow .. he's not even liked by the press because he claims to do their job better than they do.

Journalism is what stands between us and totalitarianism, and here's a serious pain in the side of established power .. just as it should be.

Here in the UK we had the parliamentary expenses scandal .. another journalism-led release of information that scuppered the boats of many unscrupulous MPs.

Members of the BNP have had their details leaked.

Information will out.

The beginnings of PR

The story of how PR came about is one of releasing information, not hiding it. As I remember the story, in the early days of the American railroads, when crashes happened the companies naturally tried to keep the press off the story, resulting in bad news for days. The first actions of PR were to release information as is was discovered to the press who reported it factually and quickly to everyone's benefit. It's better to just say what's happened and be judged by your actions.

So here we are, in an information age. Our online life is recorded. We have the capability now (affordable disc capacity) to video our entire lives from start to finish .. why not record (bug) our every conversation? CCTV of course watches our movements. Our mobile phones are logged and tracked, our credit and loyalty card accounts record our every transaction. Our DNA is everywhere.

As a child I rather liked the idea of every crime being solvable by something very like current forensics, meaning people just didn't get away with crime.

New strategies for an open world

I think we all have to realise we live in an open world. Many are facing this now. I know people who won't join Facebook because there are people from their past they would rather not face.

It's very smug of me to sit here as if I've never done anything wrong. I read the story yesterday of someone who got sent to prison and thought they would use the time to interview every fellow prisoner. They couldn't find anyone in there who'd done anything wrong. To feel right about ourselves, we justify our actions.

What I'm saying is what I tell all my clients. The secret of success in business nowadays when information is so fast, so detailed and absolute, and so mobile, is to be fabulous. It's not really about search engine optimisation or pay per click or social media strategies. It's about serving people and being outstandingly good at what you do. Everything else follows.

I was looking at religions the other day and came across the idea in Buddhism that it's not your action that matters, it's what lies behind what you are doing. You know in your heart whether what you are doing is right or not. You know when you buy that t-shirt for £3 that you are supporting sweatshop labour, and you justify it by saying at least they have jobs or that that's a living wage over there. In your heart you know it's wrong, but intellectually, you justify it.

So what that means is, to come through and succeed as a small business in this connected world you need to act with a good heart or your karma will bite you back. So how does that work, in business?

How branding fits in

Brand values are at the centre of this. If you want to say that you run a business with a small footprint, an ecologically fair company, you are saying that because you want to appeal to your audience. It probably wouldn't help to have that value if you're making and selling uranium tipped bullets.

So in marketing, first you spot the need that you want to fulfil. You work out what values your audience would like to live by, and you assume those values. Values, by the way, are pretty flexible. So I'm not talking about getting the essential 'you' out there. We are higher animals, we live by consciously chosen creeds and rules (so .. get choosing).

Then you promote and live by those values and people choose whether to buy from you or not. What they are saying when they do is .. we like your values.

Brands, it is said, are better than friends because they are consistent.

So get thinking about brand values. Think about all the products and services you buy and their brand values. Are you fun? Scientifically proven? Effective? Cheap? When you know that, what would an 'effective' company do?

After a while you have your brand values and some regular clients who agree with your values. You'd better be consistent.

The company that lives by good brand values can open up to social media

And, having said this isn't about online marketing techniques let me just say this. If you and your business live by true values, you can open up. Your staff and customers will be loyal. With social media, you can involve people and if you are true, there's nothing to be scared of. Sure, it has to be managed, but here's the thing:

Imagine you are the customer and you have to choose between two companies. One is open, the other is secretive and closed. Which is it going to be? The one you can talk to on Twitter or the other one?

So this is about having great values and living by them.

The point about Wikileaks isn't that it publishes stuff people would rather be kept secret. It's that it publishes stuff that reveals organisations we believe are doing one thing are actually doing another. That damages companies (or political leaders) that don't live by their own brand values and benefits those who do.

Every day a zillion small Wikileaks happen in social media such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube (remember the airline that breaks guitars?) as people report bad service and broken products. But let's be clear. It's not the bad service or broken products that are at issue (think Ryanair .. they offer poor service that's brand consistent and all is well, or even Reggie Perrin's Grot). It's a mismatch between the expectations of the brand and the delivery.

Some things we can't fix, but if you work with a good heart at clear, wholesome and shared values you have nothing to fear from Twitter or Julian Assange.

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Starting a bed and breakfast business

2010-02-21: OK, this blog is all very well but let's make it real. Let's take, over time, a bed and breakfast, preferably someone who is starting a bed and breakfast business near to Scarborough, and publicise it using all the things I know.

How did that idea come about?

As I was writing the previous blog I was thinking, well, I'm not really taking my own advice. The best way I've found to blog is to write the blog, leave it overnight, then tidy it up, add-in key search terms ("start a bed and breakfast business" is one for this article), and then publish it.

So I took the previous blog's text and put it into Google's Keyword Tool. That is supposed to take the text, work out what it's about, and provide other keyphrases that might be of interest.

It can do this because Google, obviously, knows what people type into the search engines. So its suggestions are based on those search terms, and it provides both the frequency of use and an indication of how competitively each term is fought over in Google's Adwords pay per click advertising system.

If you've not seen this sort of tool before, let's be clear how big a deal that is. Type in any phrase (for this, I typed in "starting a bed and breakfast"), and Google will tell you the number of times people are searching for that phrase (320 times per month) and similar ones ("how to start a bed and breakfast", 170), and how keen people are to bid for each of those terms (maybe 6/10). It's nothing to do with your website, it's about search frequency in Google. That's awesome market information, even if you're not doing Internet marketing, even if you just want to know what to stock in your shop.

Anyway, it's a bit imperfect when presented with a lot of text. It thinks the key issue I talk about in this blog is starting up in business. I mention 'startup' only twice and talk about all sorts of other things, so that doesn't really make sense, but the point is .. perhaps in that case my own blogs should be more optimised for keywords than they are.

So wandering down the results of Google's Keyword Tool, a phrase like "start a business" has 90,500 searches per month in the UK, and 10/10 for competitiveness. I don't think I really have a right to be in that space, so let's keep looking.

Marketing a bed and breakfast business online

Well, to cut a long story short I settled on "starting a bed and breakfast" (I kinda like people who are willing to type out "bed and breakfast" rather than B&B). As I said above, that phrase attracts 320 searches per month, so 10 per day, and the competition's maybe 6/10. I've worked successfully with lots of B&Bs so I know what I'm doing .. I live in Scarborough after all .. so I think I have a right to be there when someone types in "starting a bed and breakfast", "how to start a bed and breakfast business" or even "run a bed and breakfast". And if I can get to work with a new startup bed and breakfast business every month, I'd be happy with that.

So I think what I'm looking for is a guinea pig bed and breakfast business, someone who is willing to go through the whole process of publicising their bed and breakfast with me, 'live', even on camera. YouTube, blogging, Twitter, Facebook .. the whole shebang. And let's see if what I say and do works on a real business. It can be a new bed and breakfast business or one that needs more visitors.

So basically, if you are a bed and breakfast, especially if you're starting a bed and breakfast in or near Scarborough and you fancy that, get in touch. First come, first served.

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A quick summary of how what I do is different to building websites

2010-10-07: This is an outline of what I offer that I sent to a web developer who is looking for collaborees, so I would do the Internet marketing bit and he would do the website building bit. After I'd written it, I thought it summarised quite neatly the difference between what I do and what a 'normal' web developer does.

You'll see that I top and tail the web development process. What I do is crucial right up front when you're deciding what you want your website to be like. And after your website is done, you need to market it .. that's me. So here's what I sent (I've changed the names and subjects):

OK Geoff, you'll need a comfortable seat and a coffee for this, here's my take on The Granite Place, Matlock.

Initial design for SEO

I guess the bottom line is we get to do what the client wants. What follows is what I would do in an ideal situation.

The first thing, before you even start to think what you are going to do with your website is to get the marketing right, and that starts with demand, so the first thing I would want to do is to look at the number of people who search on a wide range of keyphrases related to this company's business, assess competition and (alongside the client) relevance to their business, then group the keyphrases. I would then want to write a page for each of those keyphrase groups. That, for me, forms the start of the structure of a website.

(The problem with most websites is that they are organised according to the structure of the business, not according to customer needs. So for instance, let's imagine you go to a car website and it gives you links to the Careera, the Poncho, the Cashew and the WhitePurple .. all cars they manufacture. They assume you know which is the hatchback and which the 4x4. Or, they assume you know which you want. Or you go to a mobile company and they say do you want PAYG or a contract? Basically, you don't know until you learn more. Those are organised according to the owner's deep understanding of their business, but that's not how the customers see things. They may have just started thinking they need a new car and may not have chosen yet whether they want a diesel or petrol, or a saloon v a hatchback. You need a new phone, but whether you go for a contract or PAYG surely depends on the phone you like and the relative costs.

Often you can start with lifestyle, or develop a short flowchart to help guide people to the product that would suit them, so for fireplaces you might, from gas fires, ask .. modern or traditional styling .. it has to fit in a room so that's already decided.

You can end up with menu options that mean nothing to the customer. The shop owner will have to help me with those phrases and topic, and if you confuse your customers, you're dead, so on your example website I would have something to explain each phrase to help the customer know what they've got and what they need. If we can guide people through their needs to our solutions and turn a list of 50 choices into a choice of three or four, that's more like it.

And that explanation place becomes something the search engine picks up whenever someone wants help with that, and if you're helpful, you might get the business.)

So, in principle, we are writing pages about the relevant things that clients are searching for.

Let's assume for a minute that that's enough to get you a first page position and some traffic from natural search.

Improving your conversion rate (sell more with the same traffic)

The next thing you want is for your website visitor to buy something from you, the percentage who do is your conversion rate.

So, how do we improve conversion?

(Everyone wants more traffic, very few are looking at conversion .. it's not right. Conversion begets traffic. If you convert, you're doing a great job. People will beat a path to your door. If you're not converting, more traffic just disappoints more people).

• Usability is important, so a usability test is important using real users. It's fairly cheap to do and usually brings out a load of things that could be better that you and I and your client would never have noticed. I include accessibility and internationalisation in this.
• Psychology: we should try to appeal to our visitors' subconscious as well as their conscious intellect. So we should provide pictures of food and/or attractive and happy people and probably include a small amount of movement (a slow javascript slideshow works) for our subconscious and facts, figures, comparison charts and so on for our intellect.
  
  There are a number of persuasion possibilities too, I'll pick three at random: social proof: testimonials, Facebook/Twitter pages with good comments and company responses and a fair number of fans; commitment: get someone to give you their contact details and they are implying that they trust you enough. If they've done that, you are halfway to selling to them, so give them small ways in .. download a PDF guide to all the different product types, for instance, or encourage them to follow or friend you on one of the social media networks. Scarcity: if you mark something up as your most popular model and show there's only one left, that will encourage sales.
• We should, of course, cover the basics: a competitive price, delivery, guarantee, and add-on services such as fitting, maintenance and support.
• Copy: Text is persuasive. You need good copy because that's what persuades people to buy and because that's partly what Google uses when it decides when and where to display you in the search results. Combining the two is a skill. You need someone good on that just as much as you need professional, not amateur photographs (unless amateur is part of your branding).
• Video. It's still the next big thing. Check out this and this if you think you need an ultra professional five-figure setup before you make a start.
• Interact: This isn't about setting up a shop and just taking people's money. Their questions need to be answered (and then organised into a real FAQ). There's a basic Internet principle that says we should provide our content in the way the user wants it. So if they like Twitter, we should be on Twitter. If they want email, we'll write back to them by email. If they want a live video interaction on Skype .. hell, why not? Social media is partly like the phone and fax used to be. But social media is also public. Answer a question on Twitter and you don't just impress the person you're tweeting with, you impress the crowd of twenty gathered around, too.
• Information architecture: basically, how information is gathered, used and presented to the benefit of everyone. In ecommerce, it's about gathering information about your business and using it to help future customers. Which of these products is the most popular? Which do young people like? What's new? Which is most fuel efficient? Which do people add to their wishlist the most? Can I share my wishlist on Facebook and get my friends' inputs? Can I organise these products by price and unselect them by category until I've a shortlist of two or three?
• Blogging: While we are at it, we should work out what the news and information opportunities are, decide whether anyone in the business is going to have the will, the time, and the skills to blog, Tweet and so on, or will they need someone to do it, or are we not going to bother (bad idea)?

All of this, ideally, is to be considered right at the start.

Build your website

Having answered all that, you get to build the site.

After you've built your website ..

Then post-build, we are into:

• coaching/training in social media/blogging and systems setup: there's a guy in Bridlington who runs a B&B and moans about his clients. There's a right way and many wrong ways to do this and there's a lot to it, so clients need coaching and that's ongoing until it's right.
• usability testing, watching Analytics, running tests and continual improvement: once you see the real traffic flowing through your site it should inform improvements. Someone who knows what to look for needs to watch that and make suggestions. If, for instance, searches on the phrase 'granite worktop' convert better than 'marble worktop' then maybe we should blog more on granite worktops. Or check the prices against competitors. And maybe check our product ranges. And our online copy.
  
  You can (and should) set up tests. Pages convert at a particular rate. If your granite worktop page converts at, say, 2%, wouldn't it be nice if it converted at 4%? By testing different headlines, layouts, photographs and so on, you can iterate your way to better conversion for the whole website. Testing is ongoing and forever.
• Link building: The website that comes top in your industry for your main keyphrase has 608 pages of its own and the home page has 80 inbound links. It's been around since 2004 so let's take an initial guess and say that it's currently adding 2 pages a week and one or two inbound links a month. An active blog with two entries per week and an equally active programme of fleshing out website content wherever traffic shows there is opportunity and need would allow us to catch up with them over the medium term and gain us the search position we want.
• in the meantime, you can buy traffic using pay per click (PPC) advertising, usually Adwords or Facebook but other places too. You probably know how that works, but basically it's not simple. The price you pay in Adwords is partly to do with what you bid, but it's also your quality score, and that is partly to do with the closeness of match between the search term, the ad text, and the landing page text. So basically you need a specific landing page and ad for each search term. Also, you need a fast site and a low bounce rate. Once you are over all that, you can buy specific traffic and watch, say, 200 go to a specific page on your site and then decide whether it's converting at a good enough rate for you. If so, fine, press on with SEO stuff (which takes time, effort and money), if not, change something and go again. Basically, use PPC to check the efficacy of your website's conversion mechanisms for particular search terms.
• if you like, you can think about competitions and ways to engage people and go for viral marketing effects through social media. That may not be totally appropriate for this client, but I mention it generally.

OK, so what this boils down to is there should be a lump of money for marketing input to the initial concepts and requirements of the website. Then you build the website with a little bit of input from Internet marketing, more if I'm writing the copy. Then there's ongoing work on all the things above .. blog coaching, PPC, link building, testing, traffic monitoring and so on.

It's a lot. It may put off some clients. But here's the thing. Actually it's one of my favourite life rules: everything is as complex as it can humanly be. It's the natural order of things. Kicking a ball into the back of a net is a lifetime's work once you want to make it your profession. There are ten natural search slots on page one of Google for any search term. If it's a moneymaking term, you bet there's competition. 42% of traffic goes to the person in the top position. That person will defend their livelihood with all the passion they can bring to it, and they'll stop you taking the food from their children's mouths if they can. It's a fight. If you want to make money online, you need to throw some resources at it to dislodge an incumbent or two. Once you're there, it's easier to defend. How much resource is needed? That depends on the profit from the search term.

So if you are working for small companies, then we can start with small traffic, specific long-tail search terms and build up a flow of small-beer positions which gradually add up to something worthwhile.

If you are working for larger companies, then the budget should reflect that. I've seen companies spending £10m a month on Internet marketing. Most often the bulk of that, wrongly IMHO, is on PPC.

I offer everything I've spoken about here.

I haven't spoken about email marketing .. I haven't done much of that, it's not really my thing, but I suppose if you've got someone on board who knows about that, fine, just keep the costs in proportion with all the other things mentioned here and remember that ads and promotions like this are not long term, whereas SEO, link building and social media connections are.

Let me know what you think :-)

All the best
J

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Using user's dandruff

2010-08-16: Murderers probably use anti-dandruff shampoo because if you're thinking of murdering someone, you care about what you leave behind. One speck of dandruff left on the scene can get you convicted.

Similarly (kind-of) as we wander around the Internet we leave behind information that others can use, against or for us depending on their inclination.

Use the data your customers don't even know they leave

As a white-hat web developer, I'm interested in that data because it means I can improve the user experience for all visitors. What's really beautiful about it is that I'm not bothering the customer. There are no questionnaires for them, nothing to click, no popups, no "where did you hear about us" questions when they enquire. I'm just sweeping up after they've visited, and analysing what I've found.

Actually, that's not quite right. I'm not really sitting and looking at everyone's data, I'm building automated systems that do the job for me.

Use data for a purpose

The other thing that's woven into this idea is that it's guided by psychology. I'm not doing it for nothing, I'm doing it in order to make more money and I'm doing that by providing a better service, or better information, than my competitors.

A simple example

Take a look at the 'rooms' page for this Scarborough B&B. First, of course, we have up-to-date pictures of every room.

Second, I've organised it so people know which are sea-facing and which are rear-facing, and which are up lots of stairs.

Each picture is clickable to see a much bigger photograph so people can have a really good root around.

Now, notice where it says "Our Most Popular Room!" or "Our second most popular room"? That's based on 'live' data. Basically, having established that the number of clicks on a room tallies with bookings, every time someone clicks on a photograph to see the larger version, I'm storing that fact in a database. Every time someone loads this page, I'm querying that database to ask .. which photograph got the most clicks, the second most, and the third most. Then I'm reporting that on the page, 'live'. So this will change as customers' behaviour changes.

What's in it for the user?

Why? On the one hand I'm trying to be helpful. There are quite a few rooms there, which is quite a lot of deciding for the user. It's useful information to know which others think are the better rooms.

Users might also think that the most popular rooms will get booked up earlier. So I'm using two principles of influence here to try to improve bookings and conversion: social proof (others like those rooms too, so I'm safe to book), and scarcity (those rooms are popular, I should book now).

Of course I'm measuring the results of that change and I'll report back later if it makes a significant difference.

User data as a word cloud

In another, perhaps more sophisticated example, I installed a word cloud navigation system on Metcalfe Insurance Brokers' website that shows the most popular types of insurance users want when they arrive.

But there's more. If you click on one, and come back to the home page, you'll find the option you clicked on is larger. That word cloud is now customised for you and is different to others'. That data sticks around for a little more than a year, so that if you make your decision about where to buy your insurance over, say, a week, whenever you come back to the page it's easier for you to find the pages you visited last.

And next year when you come back to renew, the site will remember the pages you want .. it's customised to your needs. This is what I mean when I talk about customisation.

Watch for changes here too

On this blog, I've completed the task of indexing every word. What's next is a word cloud for each blog that takes a mix of the most popular words in my entire blog with the words from this particular blog entry, so you might see 'customisation' as a bigger word in the cloud next to this blog. Since you're interested perhaps in seeing what else I've written on that subject, you might click that word in the word cloud, and see another blog entry. If you click again, I will have remembered the two blogs you've already read on the subject, and I'll send you to another.

What all this does is provide a more engaging, personalised, interesting, embracing, trustworthy and useful browsing experience for the user who may well be more inclined to spend their money with you instead of your competitors. Amen to that.

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I don't like poetry, but

2010-11-13: I don't like poetry. Well, that's how it's been since not quite getting into Ted Hughes at school (1977) when others did. I've wanted to, for all those years. I know, in principle, the power, the nakedness, the reality, the purity, the DIY now .. the potential of poetry. I went to a poetry night once and read some Ivor Cutler, so I have tried, but I don't like daffodils much.

The problem with the Internet is that you're at the helm. You take it where you want to. You find out things that uphold your belief system. You like the bands you like, the clothes you like, the foods you like. It's what defines you. (Except, secretly, marketers are listening, watching, whispering, opening some doors and closing others, but let's not get into that now).

So when someone like John Peel dies, we lose an awful lot. Sometimes we need to get out of ourselves or we'll end up scratching our own eyes out with boredom: "Geeze, another chicken Jalfrezi, aren't I bored with myself yet?"

People like Peel guide us to new things. They help us find new stuff. Open us up. The world's very big and very cruel and I know it's hard to face what's out there. But if you don't, one day, it'll pull out one of your trendy iPod earphones when you least expect it and whisper you something that'll make your ileum knot.

And so it was, that Hollie McNish appeared out of the silence on Woman's Hour and showed me that poetry really is one of those things we have, we can do. Our true voice. Ours. Uninfluenced. No equipment necessary. You can do it right now. Like hugging and cooking and looking out for a friend. Revolutionary acts nowadays.

So now I can't say I don't like poetry any more because Hollie was my tipping point (and James Koppert got me to the edge). So now I have more than a handful of people that speak to me through poetry. My kinda people. Here they are:

It's a bloody horrible word, serendipity, but we do need it. Do something to get more serendipity in your life.

PS. I'm the same way with folk music but haven't reached the tipping point yet.

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Write to satisfy demand, don't write about you

2011-03-16: I have a client with a brand new website who has brought me on board to generate traffic, and the site is all wrong.

It looks fabulous. 99% of people would look at it and say it was great. It was developed by a friend of mine who came through the same Internet computing course as me and whose work I admire greatly.

But it's wrong. I'm working on the SEO for the site and .. it's never going to successfully find potential new customers and generate new enquiries. It's always going to waste time and money while the client desperately tries to generate traffic.

Why?

The website is about the client, not about the customer.

What's the first thing you think about when you want to develop a website? What to put on it.

What do you put on your website? Your products, your services, about me, prices, delivery, testimonials.

Then what?

It has to look nice.

And there you have it. A site that looks nice, and is about you. 99% of websites.

Instead, here's how I build websites.

First: Write about what people search for

Find out what people are searching for online that we can profitably help with.

Google handles many hundred millions of searches every day. That's a powerful river of customer demand you should ride .. or .. there will be ten results on the first page of every query. So if not you - your competitors.

That search data is easily available, and the gathering of that information and making decisions about what to prioritise for your business is called Keyphrase Analysis. It looks at what people are searching for online in your market, creates core keyphrase clusters, analyses the strength of the competition, and merges that with information about your profitability and strategy to come up with a priority list. Those become the pages on your website.

In other words, write pages about the things people search for.

Second: create customer pathways

Make sure people who arrive to our home page having used those target search phrases can easily find pages that satisfy and convert them into enquirers.

That's about customer journeys, navigation, usability and persuasion.

Third: get out more

It's no longer about your website. It's about your entire online presence.

In your heart you know this, it's just, few people know how to make it real. The time when you could build a website, tick it off your to do list and move on are definitely gone forever.

To start with, there's social media. That blurs the boundaries between what's yours and what's your customers. Now, you have an online presence that includes your website along with whatever you are doing on the likes of YouTube, Flickr, Twitter, Facebook, forums, your blog, and eBay. You are big or small accordingly.

Then there are various tools for monitoring and managing how your customers interact with those online properties, but mainly your website. In other words, you can use your customers to tell you what's good and what's bad about your website. In other words, it doesn't actually matter what we think looks good, reads well, or 'works' according to research. What matters is managing your website and improving it based on their behaviour, and we do this with tests where some customers see (for instance) one photograph, others see another, we monitor conversions and when the experiment is over we choose the best photograph and test something else. This isn't small: this is hugely powerful.

Putting up a website is OK, but you have to go where the people are and tempt them to come and see it. It makes the social media cloud your introductory space, and your website your conversion machine.

Whenever you are in public, you are in character as your brand. Would your brand be on mySpace? Would it be on Facebook? What would it do on Twitter?

What you end up with is not a brochure that happens to be on the web. You get an online marketing system that

• listens as much as it talks
• engages with your customers wherever they are online
• naturally generates free traffic
• lives your brand values online
• naturally converts visitors into a flow of free enquiries
• builds and develops as we observe customer behaviour and interactions

That's a big difference.

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How one UK ecommerce site came top, an analysis

2010-11-30: This isn't one of mine, but it's a great illustration of how online marketing should be done.

In conversation one night my g/f and I got excited about 1930s interior decor and went searching through Google images. One image stood out as being particularly beautiful.

If you click through to the story, it's a really well written, knowledgable and useful introduction to the Hollywood Regency style.

After reading that we can click through to other articles, or look at some bestselling items in the shop. The shop .. that's right. This is all for Terry's Fabrics.

My g/f sent a link to that picture to her mum and to me and I'm now blogging and putting up those links so you might click through to them too. In publishing these links, I'm creating two outbound links from my blog to their website. I'm giving them some of my Page Rank and raising them in the search results, while bringing myself down.

So, what we have is an e-commerce website selling curtain poles, fabrics, rugs and so on. Attached to that is a really excellent blog.

Does it work? Search in Google for printed duvet covers .. yes, there they are, number 1.

What does it take to do the same?

Well, they are writing an excellent blog a day, so whatever it takes to do that .. I'd say a couple of hours a day when you count in management time, sourcing pictures, wondering what to write about and so on. And it's not something you want to outsource to Indonesia .. this writer knows something about their subject.

Such articles get re-used to get more links from the effort of writing, if we search for a phrase from one of the blogs from a month ago we can see the terry's entries but ooh look, there's something similar in ezinearticles from someone called Ian McKintosh and guess what, he's pumping out an article a day on that site and whoa .. he works for Terry's too! What seems at first blush to be good about this is that the articles seem to be inspired by each other instead of being the same article just worded slightly differently .. very good practice.

Now, whether Ian the ezinearticles chap and Helen the blogger and Terry him or herself are all the same person, we don't know, it's all a bit quiet on LinkedIn, but anyway, there's a good few hours of work a day here, but what fabulous results! Terry's is beating much more established names to the top of Google.

How are they doing it? They are blogging. Creating great content, and bringing people to the shop. And through that, they are getting top rankings for search phrases people are using when they want to buy something.

I'm not seeing Facebook or Twitter in the mix, it's just blogging.

The result? Yahoo! says the site has 16,292 pages, and 2,587 inbound links. Wow. They've been blogging steadily since 2008 and now they lead. Imagine trying to beat this!

Plus, it looks like 'Terry' used to blog him/herself and then later brought in one or more writers.

So when I say the right way to do this is to create a system that creates great content and genuinely contributes to the Internet, this is what I'm talking about. This is big business.

I can do this for you. It's what I do. Get in touch.

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Writing for the web, marketing your small hotel

2011-04-03: I'm formalising one of the ways I work, and calling it A Million Tweaks. It's basically consultancy in affordable bits for small businesses, and being in Scarborough with lots of B&B experience, I've started with marketing B&Bs and small hotels.

Since it's my own business I can bootstrap it .. start from nothing and build from there. So I've worked through my own free-to-use online marketing guide (it's open to everyone so feel free to look around that site), particularly the online marketing strategy stuff and formalised my routine for writing for the web, for SEO and for Google (I haven't written it up yet, but I provide the link because I will).

Using my own methodology as if I were using Flow Marketing as a client, here's the text I've ended up with for B&B and small hotel marketing.

I mention it in case you are a small hotel, bed and breakfast or guest house .. if you could let me know whether my text 'works' for you or leaves you cold, I'd appreciate it.

In the meantime, I'm a bit pleased with it. Obviously it needs to be shaped in the forge of online traffic interaction, but it's a good start. Unless you think different.

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Newsnight and the soft zone

2010-12-20: A new client of mine was featured on the BBC2 late night serious politics and news show Newsnight a week or so ago, causing a 42x rise in keyphrase searches on their company name on the day. Nice, of course, but what I found interesting was that the bounce rate for their name dropped by 30% (and for a reason I haven't discovered yet, this client has a very high bounce rate around 45%).

So I just wanted to make a point about pre-selling. The visitors coming in after the Newsnight piece had basically been pre-sold. They knew what to expect and had already decided they were interested in the company based on what they had seen on Newsnight.

That's the same effect that a blog attempts to achieve, or a YouTube channel, or PR. It's delivering the company message to a reader or viewer before they decide whether to engage with the website itself .. the equivalent of looking in the window before walking into the shop where you know you could be directly sold to.

It provides just another reason for building out a layer of news and information as a soft zone around your website, in which people can find more engaging stories and information that relate directly to them, their experiences and the problems they want to solve, so you can meet your people half way and guide them back to your site which then takes on the functionality more like the till in a shop. It's a place where people want efficiency and clarity and to be able to buy and pay for what they want.

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You should write an ebook

2011-01-12: You should write an ebook, says Seth Godin.

Ok, let's just look at that for a minute. First of all, that was written in early 2007. Has Internet marketing changed in that time? Yeah, it has.

But here's what's gotten me really annoyed. Godin, I'm sure, is a lovely man. But he doesn't know me, my market, what I sell .. nothing.

His tale of the success of his e-book is about the Godin brand. He's been building that for years. When Godin speaks, there are people around to listen. Millions of them. Godin has a list. He has an audience.

If I wrote an e-book, my mum probably wouldn't read it. So that advice is basically crap, for me and very probably for you.

That's the difference between engaging me to help with your Internet marketing, and flailing around in the miasma of Internet marketing advice online.

So here's your choice.

Choice 1: take advice from the milkman and Godin and your brother and whatever you find on the Internet and whatever pops up in your inbox and do what they say, or pick and choose and do the things you think are right. Go ahead.

Choice 2: engage me and I will guide you to do the right thing. Have you seen the Black Cab Sessions? For small businesses my role is to listen, understand, cogitate, and provide a clear path forward. You are not Seth Godin. You may very well not be the same sex as Seth Godin. Not in the same country. You're probably not in the same market. Probably don't want the same things, have the same skills, have the same personality.

You are different. Your market is different. Your product is different. Your resource level (time, money, energy, enthusiasm) is different. You can do different things. It's a different time, the world is different, things have moved on, gotten worse / gotten better. You probably get the idea.

My advice is personalised. It's my best advice to you, taking everything into account. Different every time. Playing to your strengths as we see them.

Do you write poetry? Imagine you run a server farm (a bank of computers). If you wrote poetry about the silent, churning power of all your humming servers .. there's something there that's different, interesting.

So I'll use all your strengths, all your resources, to your best advantage.

But you know what? Sometimes I'll push you into something you don't want to do because I think you need to do it.

Sole traders fill a space the shape of their own personality and sit there all comfortable. Sometimes something needs to be broken and rebuilt better if you are to move forward. I'll do that.

So I don't know if that makes me a coach. A psychologist. A pain in the arse. A consultant. An Internet marketing know it all. A guru. Probably none of those.

I just know what I do.

I start from where you are. We take your strengths and we set off to press them home. We test, change, test, change and when it's working we turn it up to 11.

I stop you having to wade through all the possibles and maybe never finding the one thing that works.

OK, I, also, may not find what works. But I may be one of your best chances of finding it and anyway, testing sorts us out if we are off target.

My strategy, when we've worked it out, will provide clarity and will save you from a million "you should write an e-book"s, to which a good response IMHO is "wtf, you don't even know me, how can you say that?"

Hope that helps.

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Yorkshire Sculpture Park

2006-09-03: We spent Saturday at Yorkshire Sculpture Park. It's near Wakefield just off the M1 and free to get in (but just a little bit to park the car). We loved the main building, it was a bit Corbusier-ish and a bit like living a CAD walkthrough. They could have done with having some decent books in the bookshop though.

I rather liked this by Kenny Hunter .. partly because I liked the flower bunch salute but also the large pendant or brooch she's wearing .. although I might be misunderstanding that.

The James Turrell work is both moving and rather mindbending, and his exhibition seems to have been extended until December (I think) although the website doesn't seem to reflect that as I write. He's a Quaker, apparently. Another notch in favour of that religion .. there have been a lot of those recently.

The Deer Shelter, also by Turrell but a permanent feature at YSP I think, is a skyspace where people sit around on polished concrete seats looking at the sky through a hole in the roof. At first, we couldn't make out what we were seeing because the sky, having rained most of the morning, was a featureless white so there was nothing to focus on, but as it cleared the whole thing really worked. You could spend all day in there. Shocking events happen .. a bird might fly past or a twig blow past on the wind, and you can't help yourself but gasp and grin. One bird flapped happily past, very high, singing for all the world. A leaf blew into the shelter. No really, it's fantastic.

The Art Fund might be worth an investigate too.

I was very moved by Alec Finlay's Propagator, a greenhouse containing .. as I remember it .. pots with plants labelled with a mesostic .. oh hang on, I'll let him explain it. The one that got me was Olive:

My favourite and most moving piece was Gerry Loose's Seed Catalogue .. again I'll let him explain:

Besides the interesting stuff there were lots of traditional sculptures knocking around in the fields by, for instance, Barbara Hepworth, Henry Moore, and Antony Gormley.

I found some textures I liked:

The landscape can be effortlessly stunning:

Some practical reporting for you: Knaresborough doesn't have a lot of accommodation and it's reasonably expensive so we really struggled to find anything at all .. apparently our date clashed with a carpet exhibition in Harrogate. We got a cancellation at The Yorkshire Lass, a pub opposite the entrance to Mother Shipton's Cave and on the bank of the river Nidd. The pub's probably famous for its home cooking as that's what it was, and the visitors book contained lots of good comments. We found it a bit meaty, but the vegetable casserole in yorkshire pud was wholesome.

We found it almost dead in the bar on a Saturday night and wandered over the road to The World's End which operated a bit like the Cheese Shop Sketch where it displayed lots of lovely real ales, Ruddles County, Black Sheep, Deuchars IPA, but none were available. As a sign of the times, the barmaid was, I think, Polish, and the following night was a Polish night.

Quite by chance on our night, The Slim-Line Papas were playing. Pete O'Brien's the wild main man with real skill on double bass, Egly Lucas makes all his own guitars, while the skill of Sam Saunders was evidenced by someone who got up in the interval (at the band's invitation, they are well up for jamming, teaching people how to play the instruments and so on) to play the kit who just bashed away without any of the subtlety Saunders was clearly employing. Plus, he introduced me to a spring drum. I want one. If they come to a venue near you and you feel like you need perking up, go see.

Another thing tied the day together. One of my big interests is colour. I feel like I could spend the rest of my days investigating colour spaces. This follows a lecture at uni in which it became clear that both RGB, the colour space used in web design, and CMYK (printing) leave perhaps 50% of all perceivable colours unrepresented. In other words, what we see on screen is a very poor representation of real life. The same problems must beset artists .. purple is a recent colour for paint which is why it's associated with royalty because it was expensive to produce at first and only they could afford it. James Turrell's Deer Shelter cuts through all of that by framing the real thing. It's the ultimate HDTV. Similarly, listening hard to the Slim-Line Papas, the drum sound was really gorgeous, and the rest was too but you could tell everything else had been amplified. That whole process of collecting the sound with a mic, amplifying it, and throwing it out again through a speaker stack distorts and changes the sound, and it loses its subtlety. The drum sound was the real sound of the kit, with nothing inbetween. Part of the pleasure and draw of skiffle, for me, is its acoustic nature, as an antidote to highly produced dance and pop music. Acoustic is real.

Of course, I found lots of natural things to be inspired by. The berries are full-on this year and it reminds me of my twelve year old (or so) self laying in bed reading what were old books then, so maybe they were published in the forties or fifties, about the natural history of Britain, and the illustrations, watercolours probably, on plates, of the different plants and animals. I remember one book had a textured cover, and inside were tales of kids having a secret friend in the woods, a man who lived there and who had a doormouse living in his jacket pocket. Yes, I know what it sounds like, that's another sign of the times. He'd take them on adventures to see badger cubs and so on, stumbling upon all sorts of interesting bits of plant and animal life along the way. I spent a good few weeks trying to find a doormouse so it could live in the pocket of my school blazer. I rather like gathering these emblematic images, I imagine perhaps some ex-pat Brit would enjoy them or a Japanese or Russian person. Maybe they are as British as London buses, Beefeaters, and invading countries populated by swarthy people. Anyway, I enjoy documenting the norm because before long it ain't norm any more.

This, particularly, took me back. I remember the drawing of the Robin's Pincushion gall in that book. I don't know whether this, in Knaresborough, is exactly that, but it's the same sort of thing:

There were quite a few of these around which I don't see in Scarborough, both in Knaresborough and at Yorkshire Sculpture Park. My best guess is a Speckled Wood.

Finally, I have to mention the YSP map. It's a real lesson in how not to do it.

Would it not be reasonable to assume, given that the lakes are blue and the convention for representing water in blue, that there were some water features about the bottom right of the map, encircling A and B particularly? And there's that yellow path that goes through the trees just to the west of there. From B, too, we could see buildings close by, looking North (Update: upwards, another problem with this map is they've defied convention and turned the map around so North is at around 5 oclock: altogether now: reasons to be confused, 1, 2, 3). In fact, all that striped area where you're not supposed to go is a completely built-up university campus. Some indication that that area contains buildings would be nice. So we got lost walking through that until we exited the other side to look back and see a small sign partly hidden by bushes that said it wasn't part of the park and we weren't allowed in. Still lost, we tried to find that yellow path leading to the lower lake. Four of us, two very good mapreaders, couldn't work it out until it hit us. Those yellow and red paths aren't paths and the blue 'moat' isn't water. They mark the edges of zones. The paths are those insignificant looking thin brown lines. So you'd think the zones would be significant, given their prominence on the map. We couldn't see how. We couldn't work this out either:

What are those markings? What do they relate to? The colour of the disc might relate to a zone, but it's a different colour to the one on the map. The blue arrow? The yellow B? Haven't the foggiest. It's a discipline of its own, representing information in a clear way. The London Underground map is an obvious success, the YSP map isn't.

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What if you're a vole on the central reservation of life?

2011-03-19: A new client called me "I've got a great website, but ... ".

I looked at it. It's not a great website.

"But everyone tells me it is".

No, everyone who likes your website tells you it is. The other 95% are long gone.

The moral? For all sorts of reasons, you can't take what people say to you as evidence that your website is a great website because your sample is wrong .. you're only talking to those people who like your website.

• A usability test tells you.
• Traffic stats tell you.

Strangely, it's not one of those where the website looks great but is actually all wrong when you try to use it. In this case, the material is all there, the business is fabulous, it just doesn't feel like the business is fabulous when you get to the website. It's unusual for me to come to this conclusion, but this is mostly a graphic design problem.

Anyway, the moral is: when your customers tell you you're good, allow yourself a little bask, but work hard to accept that it doesn't mean you are good. It just means you matched what they wanted and delivered on your psychological contract. But they might just be weird people and yours might just be a weird website.

Which means, like a vole on the central reservation of a motorway, all the time you think things are great, you might be missing something huge.

(Which can be fine, it depends what you want).

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UnMarketing, a book review

2011-10-01: I read "UnMarketing: Stop marketing. Start Engaging" while I was a tad poorly the other day.

The highlights? "Before you can fill a stadium, you have to fill a club" .. I like that. He means .. get good at one social media platform. And if someone follows you on Twitter, get to know them there, don't sell to them or try to get them to follow you on Facebook too. Just .. slow down a sec.

He recommends using Twitter Grader (I guess Klout is an alternative) to "find the best tweeters in your area". I'm thinking .. the best tweeters are the ones who you'll engage naturally with, aren't they? Or are we spotting important people whose radar we need to get onto? Maybe. So what we really need, then, is an automated tool that will show us who, of those we are following, we really ought to be engaging with. I could build that.

There's a story about a woman who ordered a pizza that turned up late and wrong, about which she tweeted, that resulted in a tweetback from the store, then .. shock .. a video of heartfelt apology from the boss and the outlet owner. The video went viral (great news for the pizza place), and later the store owner was at an event and provided free pizza for the woman along with some flowers.

That's a lovely, heartwarming, and very American story of great customer service. Customer service is always awesome, Tom Peters had his examples twenty years ago and Carnegie before that. I'm not sure American customer service works so well over here, America has (I think) a very sales-led culture in which sales build America. Great sales, fabulous service is to be applauded.

Here it's slightly creepy and we're a lot more grumpy and less forgiving. We're not likely to go "oh hey, a video, I forgive you". We're likely to go "Do these guys know where I live?"

But .. I was very pleased to get a sensible answer when I tested Starbucks UK MD (now of Clinton Cards). Sensible, good, fast, true, but not showy, might be the UK way.

Oh yes, the author does have a hierarchy of buying starting where you are not trusted and don't have a relationship, working up to where you are and do. Ergo the point of social media is to build trusting relationships.

Basically, if you cold call, you're working the bottom of the pile along with all your competitors.

People who search through ads, Yellow Pages, search engines and so on, they don't know you but at least they have a need right now, so these people are better, but you want to raise them higher.

If you are a recognised expert in your field, then you have some trust points there. So if people arrive from search and learn that about you, that's cool.

Next step is to have a relationship. The relationship comes before the purchase, and it's a real relationship, mostly brokered over social media. Through giving and talking, you build trust.

If you are recommended by someone the buyer trusts, then some of that rubs off on you. So, if you build relationships with people, you're likely to get more recommendations and that's really the best sort of marketing.

Finally, at the top of the pile are your current customers with whom you have a relationship, they are buying from you, and they trust you.

The main messsage is .. look after your customers. And for everyone else, try to move them up that hierarchy so you have a lot of great relationships.

That's a far cry from selling.

Another hero of customer service is Zappos .. check them out (I just did. How did our chat end? "Have a great day!" :-) )

Regarding content, here's a way of thinking about it. Imagine you're a TV repairman. People want you when their TV breaks, and only then. But, if you think of yourself as an expert in your field, then of course, you can position yourself as an expert before their TV breaks. 3D TV, surround sound, all that. Write articles and use the three Ps to do it: state your main Point, then provide a scenario to illustrate your point. Finally, show how the reader can Perform it for themselves.

Tips for viral marketing? Focus on one of these three things. Either it has to be painfully funny. Or it has to be wow. Not .. "wow, new haircut". Wow like W. T. F! And given that you don't get those every day, evoking emotion is the third way. Make the hair stand up on the back of people's necks. If you've got someone's emotion and take them to a place to do something, you're getting somewhere.

So those were basically my highlights from the book. I have to say I was a bit disappointed. You know, I've been around a while, this was basically a traditional American feel good, do better business book set in a web 2.0 world.

But the title, 'unmarketing' suggests something else. That's what I wanted.

The book starts out with thoughts about building genuine relationships that sounds like it could develop into a larger unmarketing strategy, but it turns into some stories about experiences developing viral videos and managing big mailing lists, and neither sound very unmarketing to me.

It's fun, you may like it, I did .. but it didn't change my life.

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The subtleties of SEO

2011-03-29: I have a client, let's say they have a solution for a terrible disease called the radges, and I've managed to improve their sales sixfold over a year by a combination of applying psychological persuasion principles, writing for search engine optimisation (SEO), a bit of link building, tweaking the layout to improve the bounce and conversion rates, and changing the currency to acknowledge the nationality of the most common buyer.

I missed this though, and it's why you should always start with a detailed keyphrase analysis.

They convert at 4.17% for the phrase 'fixing the radges', and at 3.5% for 'fix for the radges'. They rank well for the latter which I've been working on but not the former, which I haven't.

Here's the thing. The phrase which I haven't been optimising for is used four times more often.

So here I am optimising for one phrase, when if I'd been optimising for the other one, I'd have four times the sales .. well, actually, 4.48x the business if you take account of the better conversion rate.

So, I know what my next task is.

The moral of the story? Keyphrase analysis is extremely powerful, always do one, always be guided by it. Always.

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How do you test an SEO campaign?

2010-12-10: I just got asked "How do you test an SEO campaign?" The problem is that search engine optimisation (SEO) takes months before you see the benefit. I think of it like public relations .. what you are trying to do is to change Google's opinion of you, and that is based on your markets view of you, and that's a big oil tanker to turn. The upside is that it's hard for your competitors to take your position once you get there.

That's not to say results can't be achieved tomorrow, they can .. read on.

The first test that an SEO campaign goes through is the test of your keyphrases against market data. What you are looking for first of all is to discover all the search phrases people use when they want what you sell, and there may be thousands .. it's a basic error to think there are just a handful.

Each one of those then needs to be checked that there are sufficient quantities of people searching on it in your geographic market to make it worthwhile working on, that you have the resources to beat the strength of competition, that you really deserve a front page place in search for that phrase, and that others are making money on that phrase.

Out of that analysis come some hot keyphrase opportunities.

Next up is working out which page of your website you want to direct each of those keyphrases to: your landing pages.

The next question is whether you are going to be able to sell things to people searching on each of those keyphrases, so before you invest in a medium term SEO campaign, run a pay per click (PPC) advertising campaign on your first chosen keyphrase to your chosen landing page. PPC ads can be set up in minutes and be running easily within an hour. Ballpark, you need a conversion (sale) every 200 clicks or better. If you get sales, you are then into the dual game of optimising your ads to get a great quality score and click through rates so your clicks are much cheaper, and using that traffic to improve your landing page so it converts better. Remember, when you start, you'll be spending more on the ads than you are making and there's a process to go through which may or may not end in PPC profitability but will, at least, end up in a reasonably good landing page.

If you can prove you are selling using PPC, your landing page and your chosen keyphrase, you can then move into SEO with the aim of replacing your PPC with free traffic. In the meantime you can keep running your PPC campaign or switch it off as you wish.

Since you are still testing, you'll be doing SEO on a single keyphrase group, but you really need not to write just about a tightly controlled phrase or Google will find you out .. it has to look like you are writing around a particular topic. So you work on that to build your inbound links while watching the number of inbound links you have versus your main competitor to work out whether you are gaining on them or not with the current level of activity. If not, push the accelerator harder and run for another three months or so.

Once you have your SEO position for that phrase, hopefully you'll have been testing another one with PPC so you can put phrase one into a holding pattern and start pushing at phrase two.

If a keyphrase makes money, there will be competition for it. Money matters to people. This is not easy. But millions of people do it, and this is how. It just takes enough resource and some patience, but once you have three or four top ranking, money making keyphrases you have a business and once you are in position it's much easier to defend your new online business.

If you are a small company reading this with not much resource, it's the same process you just have to choose a smaller niche where the competition is not so strong.

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A simple, organic, search engine optimisation system

2011-03-11: Here's a simple and organic system to improve your search engine optimisation if you have some traffic and an enquiry form on your website.

Firstly, set up the completion of your enquiry form to be a 'goal' in Analytics. That's a tech job so ask your web developer (or ask me) to do that.

Wait until the end of the month and then look in Analytics and see which search phrases people used to find your site where they ended up completing your goal .. ie. which search phrases turn into enquiries for you?

You may be surprised to find they are fairly long and not based around a core search term, here's a real-life example (with names changed):

• customized shoe packaging uk
• gift packaging made to order
• branded packaging
• retail gift packaging manufacturers
• customised gift packaging

These sound like great article ideas to me, or at least, blogs.

It seems to me a hierarchy of articles could be built, with these filling some of the slots, and all the slots being filled over time.

Of course, if you haven't got a page about retail gift packaging, but you just got an enquiry from that term, you must rank in the search engines somewhere for the term. Writing an article on the subject is only going to raise you higher. And we know that, for instance, if you are in position #2 and we can get you to #1 that means 3.55 times the enquiries. That's 3.55x the business, even more perhaps if they are keener to buy having read all about how you address their exact problem.

So that's an easy system to set up:

Each month:

1. Check which search terms converted last month
2. Work out whether they relate to an existing article or not
3. For each phrase where a new page is needed, write, find a great photograph for, clear, and publish. Where a phrase is a simple variant of one you've already published an article about, adjust that article

It doesn't have to stop there, of course. Once you have your story inspiration system set up, use the stories in multiple ways. Of course, once you write the article you might tweet about it and provide a link. Put it on your Facebook Page. LinkedIn. But if you really want to drive things harder .. make a video on the same subject. Podcast it. Make those stories really work for you.

What I love about this system is it automatically heat seeks. The market just told you that there's an unfulfilled need for you to provide "customised gift packaging". So you put a little effort in that direction and if more enquiries come through, you put more effort there. It's marketing evolution.

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How do you know "call us now" works better than "get in touch"?

2010-12-22: How do you know the product photograph works better than the picture of the satisfied customer? Simple, you run a split test.

Basically split tests provide one version of a website to half of your visitors, and another version to the other half. You set up a goal .. usually that the visitor buys something, ends up on a particular page, signs up for something or enquires through an enquiry form, and then you sit back and watch the games commence.

After a while (it depends how much traffic you get) you'll see one version 'converts' better than the other.

When enough results are in you end up with a statistically significant result, which basically means the winning page is unlikely to have won out of pure chance.

So then you close the test and use the best performing page as the basis of another test, maybe use different photographs, try a different headline, even list a different price.

In that way your website evolves and develops, but in the best possible way .. based on what your website visitors actually do. Not what they say they would do. And not, heaven forbid, based on what you or I think might work best .. although it's good fun to pit your judgment against real life users.

So long as the tests don't interfere, you can run a test on every one of your pages and move forward even faster.

And the beauty of split testing is that it strips out things like the day of the week, time of day, political mood, seasonal changes, economic climate and the rest because all that affects both test pages equally. If you just change a page and say "aha, that's much better" you can't be sure it wasn't something else that changed .. the sun came out, and you sell sunglasses, for instance.

Imagine you potter along with a normal website, and your competitor uses this against you .. in the end, you don't really stand a chance.

Or just think how many enquiries you are throwing away with a lacklustre, unoptimised website .. even if you are getting traffic.

And speaking of traffic, which site do you think people will recommend to their friends on Facebook or Twitter or in the pub. Which will they save in Delicious or blog about? The boring one, or the one that really stimulates and motivates and presses all their buttons? Now you know how it's done.

So .. best climb aboard and start doing A/B split testing. If you need any help, you know where I am. Either that or "call me now!".

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BarCamps are great. This isn't a BarCamp

2010-02-14: A BarCamp is a conference with some key differences. What excited me about the idea, realised at BarCamp Bradford, is that it's a user generated conference. It's the delegates who present. It's a sharing of ideas.

The key moment around which a BarCamp pivots is when the empty framework for the day is posted on the wall, a call to action is given, and the delegates, armed with marker pens, volunteer their presentations into empty slots. Ten minutes later, you have a completely planned conference.

Typically that free sense of giving and sharing is complemented by free coffee and pizza (cake, too, at Bradford) and the whole event is free. Also, in moving between tracks (BarCamp Bradford had four) and from presentation to presentation there's plenty of opportunity for networking and meeting great people. This is aided by the fact that these are more or less amateur presentations which sometimes finish early (in one case for me at Bradford, so early that as I sat down the presenter said "so, any questions?")

Because a BarCamp is created by the people attending, they are free to give presentations on whatever they like. So you can have a public transport BarCamp and you'll have a taxi driver, the local councillor responsible, someone from the Green Party talking about emissions, and someone from a traffic planning organisation saying how they could fix it given the chance. In other words, it's a real mix of people with enough gumption to get up and talk about it. Cool, engaged people, in other words. Where else would they mix?

But also it comes from the open source community, the sort of people who brought you Firefox, Linux, Blender, Audacity and pretty much all of the Internet by sharing ideas and working together freely. A BarCamp open-sources its organisation, providing the bare bones of a structure and trusting the delegates to make the conference their own. Good people, people who would share their food and look out for you, like BarCamps.

Other stuff makes it a BarCamp too, here's Wikipedia on the subject, but here's a central place where BarCamps get registered, I mean it's a bloody awful site but if you're into BarCamps (and hey, there's one in Newcastle .. yip, might see you there :-) ), that's how you find out where and when the next one is.

As part of Digital Scarborough, there's (this link has now been amended, see discussion below) BarCamp Scarborough except .. it isn't. It's 'loosely based' on the principles of BarCamp. Well .. which principles? It's free to attend, but that's about it.

There's only one track, so there are fewer mixing opportunities. But crucially, it's no more a user generated conference than any other conference. Eight presentation slots which you have to apply for ahead of time, which implies someone will decide who gets to present. That's the opposite of a BarCamp.

At Bradford Barcamp for most delegates it was their first ever BarCamp. What I'm upset about with the Scarborough BarCamp is that it's not a BarCamp, but whoever has organised it has used the word. Perhaps they thought it was cool. Maybe they don't really get what the point of a BarCamp is. There are plenty of people around who for whom open source hasn't clicked yet. Possibly they didn't think it mattered that much .. whatever it takes to make the event a success. I don't know, I'm just guessing, that's what it feels like, reading the material on the website. Perhaps whoever's behind it has laudable motives that I haven't discerned, if I hear anything I'll let you know.

But I think it takes from the idea, the brand, of BarCamp, without giving. Scarborough BarCamp isn't a BarCamp. So delegates might come away with the idea that a BarCamp is just a mini conference. It's not. Well, Scarborough's is. A BarCamp is a people-led help-each-other mindshare, and that's a beautiful thing. This isn't that.

I'm not saying I'm going to boycott it or anything. I am just very upset that the Scarborough BarCamp organisers seem to have taken the good bit (the name, the buzz and the kudos) without respecting what it stands for that gives it the buzz in the first place. It pollutes the water for those who follow. It has upset me. But, hey, worse things happen in Withernsea.

Update: there's been discussion on Twitter as a result of this:

thejawline: @JohnAllsoppIM talk to Richard Askew, he'll explain more about Digital Scarborough 2010 Barcamp http://richardaskew.co.uk/ :)

thejawline: @JohnAllsoppIM his twitter is @richaskew 2:51 PM Feb 14th from web in reply to JohnAllsoppIM

richaskew: @JohnAllsoppIM @sfrost2004 it is loosely based on the principles of a BarCamp (i've never been to one) with a little more planning 5:07 PM Feb 14th from web

richaskew: @JohnAllsoppIM @sfrost2004 There is no budget - at all. anyone can present, on any topic, its free, its going in the right direction 5:13 PM Feb 14th from web

richaskew: @JohnAllsoppIM If we get enough interest then it can run as a normal BarCamp. Numbers are crucial and Scarborough isn't a large city 6:18 PM Feb 14th from web

richaskew: @JohnAllsoppIM @sfrost2004 I take your concerns on board and I will put it to the other organisers. 6:23 PM Feb 14th from web

nipclaw: @JohnAllsoppIM @rah_rah @Charonqc @nooption @LightbulbDesign @Little_Lawyer Many thanks for your good wishes.

electric_angel: @richaskew @sfrost2004 for what it's worth, i think @JohnAllsoppIM is right. a 'bar camp' needs to be a bar camp

electric_angel: richaskew @sfrost2004 @JohnAllsoppIM don't want to be critical though - i'm excited at all the stuff happening and glad to help promote it

richaskew: @electric_angel @richaskew @sfrost2004 @JohnAllsoppIM Agreed and it will be if people show - no registratnts from Scarborough yet

sfrost2004: @JohnAllsoppIM I wanted a true BarCamp originally, but some on the DS10 cttee thought no-one would come. Hence prebooked guests compromise about 9 hours ago from Echofon

richaskew: @sfrost2004 @JohnAllsoppIM changed wording on the site. It can't be relaxed anymore people need to register like at Bradford

sfrost2004: @JohnAllsoppIM I'd love to comment on your last blog post (but can't on your blog)...you seem to make a lot of unfounded assumptions

sfrost2004: @richaskew @JohnAllsoppIM @electric_angel Just to correct a few misunderstandings: #BarCampScarb is totally free #digiscarb

sfrost2004: @JohnAllsoppIM #BarCampScarb is open source. All presentations should be made available afterwards, as per #BarCamp philosophy #digiscarb

I sent:

sfrost2004 richaskew electric_angel since it's free and scarborough's nice, small attendance isn't death, just finish at 2pm and go beach 8:12 AM Feb 16th from web

sfrost2004 email me a reply john@johnallsopp.co.uk if you like and I'll add it to the blog, I've appended all the Twitter comments 8:14 AM Feb 16th from web

sfrost2004 richaskew electric_angel but I think it's because it's not a BarCamp that people aren't showing interest 8:13 AM Feb 16th from web

sfrost2004 by 'totally free' are you providing food too? 8:15 AM Feb 16th from web in reply to sfrost2004

sfrost2004 #BarCampScarb it's the organisation that isn't open source, that's the crucial part. "Places will be allocated" .. by who? 8:17 AM Feb 16th from web in reply to sfrost2004

sfrost2004 richaskew electric_angel #BarCampScarb an open list of delegates and a threshold? "will run if >30 book, top limit 100?" 8:19 AM Feb 16th from web

sfrost2004 richaskew electric_angel #BarCampScarb It's partly a publicity job, I hope u haven't killed it by putting off the early adopts 8:20 AM Feb 16th from web

richaskew where are you making these changes, I see none here 9:40 AM Feb 16th from web in reply to richaskew

richaskew OK, I see the changes and appreciate the dialogue. about 24 hours ago from web in reply to richaskew

and, slightly out of synch, here's what I got back yesterday:

richaskew: @JohnAllsoppIM Due to funds (none) we have room for 35 people, some refreshments. We need sponsors to do what you want, not enough time. 8:52 AM Feb 16th from web

richaskew: @JohnAllsoppIM text has been changed re allocation. Twitter isn't the medium for this discussion. It would have been simpler to email us. 8:53 AM Feb 16th from web

richaskew: @JohnAllsoppIM allocation enabled us to ensure we have a full program. People to stand up and be counted or loose out to leeds etc yet again 8:56 AM Feb 16th from web

richaskew: @JohnAllsoppIM so now it is a BarCamp apart from we can't provide free food - I reckon that is close enough for the first run. agreed? 9:01 AM Feb 16th from web

richaskew: @JohnAllsoppIM Well they are there - no mention of allocation now - Refresh Cache? It is how it is now. Either get behind it or don't 10:06 AM Feb 16th from web

So where are we now? I have to say that last Bushian ("you're either with us or against us") comment doesn't sit well, but looking at the amended text I expected it not to address my main concern which is: who decides who is presenting .. it has to be the delegates themselves.

Well now it doesn't mention selection, they just want an idea of numbers so maybe it is close enough. I need to let this settle, but I'm a lot happier with the way it's presented now. I'm making a presentation next week so if that works I'll make a decision.

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It's an attention economy

2011-03-07: This is probably the most important, and most fun, part of Internet marketing. The bit where you and I wrestle with how to make your website interesting.

Back around probably the launch of Windows '98 I was working in PR and I got talking to a journalist who had been to the American press launch, and also the UK one and he was saying how the British journalists had been 'yeah, but will '98 crash less?' and the American journalists had been literally up off their chair whooping about the new features.

The other day a funky new collaboree told me about Jones Soda, a fizzy drink brand that's been turned over to the people and crowdsourced. Which is interesting. And then again, is it? I mean, it should be. My intellect goes all Bruce Forsythe "good game, good game", but at the core of me .. I'm bored.

Jones Soda is Canadian. Imagine if they'd had that idea in Manchester? They'd have been told.

There's this thing in psychology called 'agency', which (and I may be wrong) could be renamed 'intention', and a chunk of our unconscious brain hums silently watching for intention. Is that lion going to eat me? Is the boss going to fire me? Will she let me?

We evolved a bit of brain that models other people and animals in order to second guess what they might do. The better we do that the more we are likely to live and procreate.

Marketing is intention. When we walk into a supermarket or click through to a website or watch TV our brains are watching all the time for scams, hidden agendas. We have to be streetwise or our bank accounts will be emptied for us. A large and important, crucial to our survival, part of our brain is being used to watch what marketing does for signs of ill intent.

Our subconscious isn't stupid, either. It can recognise complicated patterns, even do maths, secretly, and the results come out as unease or happiness or doubt.

I may be more upset by the forthcoming changes to the NHS than I've been over almost any other political issue ever, but it took a real wrestle to get me to sign the petition that's been going around Facebook. Why? I didn't understand what it was. I'm not sure clicking 'stop child abuse' on Facebook means anything besides making me look naive to everyone I've ever known.

So as Facebook seeps onto every website, our shields go up. One day, every one of us will become aware that if we 'like' Pit-Rok, when any of our friends go to that site, they will see our name associated with it and we become roped in as hidden salespeople, advocates. And so we stop 'liking' things so readily. In order to Facebook 'like' something, we have to really like it. Really trust it.

I'm at the age where I don't care what people think. I'll like the Cheeky Girls reasonably happily. But look at younger people and they seem so very, very hot on this. I drum in a band, and we went into a college studio where a lecturer and student recorded us for an afternoon, afterwards we gave the student a local music shop voucher .. £50 I seem to remember .. and he never spent it. He was upset with us. He felt used, prostituted. He'd done it for love. For music. For kudos. We'd turned it into a financial transaction. We'd made him feel buyable.

The climate now in the UK feels almost pre-revolutionary. It only needs a spark. Cameron needs all his PR skills to damp things down. OK Blair looked slippery towards the end, but this guy. And banks. Big companies not paying their tax .. what about the Vodaphone thing .. let off their tax bill equivalent to the whole austerity package. Young people no longer getting that weekly benefit for staying on and studying. Tuition fees.

It's always been a very unequal battle. Little old you, pootling into a supermarket to face an army of professionals whose job it is to extract the most money from you they can.

It turns out most of our decisions aren't even conscious (so the only real defence is to disengage, not enter the arena). Our subconscious makes most decisions, our conscious plays catchup, inventing convincing sounding arguments about why we bought chocolate A over chocolate B but the reality is it was positioning, packaging or something else fairly intangible.

Companies know this. They treat us like laboratory rats.

There's no-one up there who represents us. Ordinary us, growing up in a terrace or semi-detached house, sharing a room with your brother. Why is there no-one on the telly with my accent?

When we turn up to our GP in a year or two's time, we'd better take our lawyer with us because it's going to be whoever shouts loudest if they hold the budget.

Trust.

We don't. Any more. It's a matter of survival. Our intention-o-mometer says no.

When the majority of the population switches off and disengages from companies, politics, work .. there's a problem.

So when you start to think "I fancy a new website", don't me-to it. Don't insult your customers with special offers and last minute deals. Don't ask your customers to be advocates. Don't .. sell.

Just serve. But do it jaw droppingly well. Think what you can give. You have to turn off your cynic first. Drop your weapons. Disarm. Love your people.

Share information that is currently private: Which of the items on your menu is most popular?

Share your knowledge.

Be genuine.

Be local.

Brands are about trust. Brands are substitute, simplified friends. We buy Apple because they are always stylish and fun. We buy Volvo to keep our family safe. We buy M&S knickers because they don't chafe (or maybe that's just me).

Start with your brand, work on your core values, define them, be certain about them because the next thing you're going to do is to turn them up to 11. What should you be doing? If your coffee is the best .. make it really, the very best. Win the world championship.

If it's cheap, make it Ryanair cheap.

Fast? Make it supersonic.

Your brand values are permanent. Always. Everywhere. Everything you do. Everything you sell. Every marketing method you use. Always and forever those values.

What's that? Solving marketing cynicism with more marketing? Yes, because people know we're in business. They know we are selling stuff. They know we're not really their friends. Just don't let us down (I'm talking to you Green and Blacks, and you Innocent).

Young people aren't cynical about everything. They're just cynical about us. I was speaking to a young guy from the Sheffield music scene talking about playing gigs, never for any money. They play for the love. And they make money for charity too. He can walk into town and meet great friends who are part of the scene too. There's mutual trust. It's local. It's close.

They're right. It's us who need therapy.

What are you thinking? Our customers rip us off? I'm trying to make money here?

It's us who need therapy.

Drop it all. Rethink. Serve.

There is no-one out there doing it right. It needs reinventing. And if it gets past British cynicism, imagine the American reaction. Where's Tom Peters when you need him?

I feel a new summer of love coming.

That would get people's attention.

(There's more about how you do that (and me mumbling on video) here).

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Is SEO worth it?

2010-12-24: SEO can take a while and considerable effort before it bears fruit so .. is it worth that effort? How can you tell ahead of time?

A client came to me with a business idea within the financial marketplace, let's say it was a service to save businesses from bankruptcy (it wasn't, but for illustration).

The first point is to say that it's easy to look at that growing market and say "I'd like a piece of that business", even to go "it's worth a gazillion pounds a year, if I only got 1% of that I'd be laughing", but it's harder (and rather less exciting) easily to see the strength of the competition .. the strength of the forces that aim to keep that business for themselves and if they can, to stop you in your tracks.

Faced with an army of 100 soldiers you wouldn't take them all on at once, you might pick the puniest looking one, take him on first and work up from there. That's the strategy for breaking into an established online market.

So we can look for the keyphrases that people use when their businesses are heading for bankruptcy. Using seed phrases such as 'business bankruptcy' we can quickly get a list of maybe 100 other phrases people use, how often they use them in our country, and the strength of the competition as a score out of ten, so that's a start (and we are already far ahead of the information available to a new shop opening on the high street).

If we choose some highly relevant phrases that have sufficient demand and low enough competition we can then look at the businesses that already have a front page position in Google in our country.

For this business, and for my favourite phrase, the top ranking business had 3,186 inbound links to its website. To beat them, I would have to get the same. But, I assume they are not standing still. We can measure it, but let's imagine they are adding 100 inbound links a month to their total. If we want to beat them in a year, we are going to have to generate 4,386 inbound links, or more than ten a day. We need a strategy to achieve that, and enough resource to fund it for a year. That seems unlikely for a small, startup business.

However, the website in position ten for that phrase only has 3 inbound links. We can beat that tomorrow. But if the tool we are using only registers and reports perhaps 1:3 inbound links, then actually we need 9 inbound links.

The tool I use doesn't report the Page Rank (PR) of those inbound links, but of course, those 3 inbound links might be PR 5 or 6 or higher, meaning we have to do the same or get lots of lower PR inbound links. We can check to see (I just did and happily the links are PR 0). One client said to me the other day "we only go for PR 4 or higher links". The danger is always that you have to appear natural to Google or they may well knock you down for gaming the system. So you need a mix of PR scoring inbound links for a secure future .. there are plenty of tales of people with a steady income, a growing company and staff to pay, waking up one morning to find the phones silent and their inboxes empty. Better to play this safe.

Now, the traffic that goes to the #10 position is just under 3% of the total traffic to the page, and the monthly traffic in the UK for my chosen phrase is 1,900 visits, so if we achieved that #10 position we would receive maybe 57 clicks a month.

Assuming we convert 1:200 visitors into a sale (you can test this with PPC before you start), and we make £1,000 a sale, that's £285 a month which is a start.

So the question becomes: is it worth putting in the SEO effort to reach that achievable #10 position for that keyphrase in order to get a year or more of £285 a month? The answer is probably yes.

Compared to trying (and failing) for months to get a position on a super-competitive phrase, this makes more sense.

And of course, once you have that position, perhaps it's worth aiming higher up the page or perhaps there are other phrases to target. The SEO function, then, in a new business, creates a flow of little sparks of business that comprise a position on a keyphrase strategically and intelligently chosen out of a large pot of possible search keyphrases. SEO can then develop those sparks into flames while also continuing to find new sparks.

How many sparks you get, and whether you can turn any into flames depends on the resource you put in, but there comes a time when, let's say you spend £100 a month on SEO because you're a weeny startup business .. actually that's too small an amount because you do have to run at the speed of your slowest competitor and if they are spending £200 a month then you'll never get anything back for your investment .. better (from an SEO point of view at least) to start with some gumption and calm down once you get a sense of your impact on the market.

But .. let's say £100 a month is enough for your startup weeny business that isn't making any sales. Let say you make your first sale after month three and by six months or so you are making maybe £1,000 a month from SEO triggered sales. That's an optimistic outcome to be honest on that size of investment, but anyway, for illustration: so then you can start to say .. well, I'll spend 10% of my SEO triggered sales on more SEO. That percentage is set by experience once you see whether your business is building or declining. Basically, SEO investment is your accelerator pedal.

So, is SEO worth it? Here you can see, all the data you need to work out your possible return on investment (ROI) is publically available so you can work it out. You can make a guess at what's needed to get a position in Google and what your return might be.

The only thing us SEO people can't guarantee is that you will actually get the position you planned for on any one occasion. But overall it will work out.

So. Calculators at the ready? Let's make some money.

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Loving the detail you can get for free once you have a client's postcode

2011-04-02: I've just had the most fun I've had in a very long time, analysing a client's customer database.

Actually, most of my experience is in business to business marketing where customer demographics doesn't apply the same way as it does in consumer marketing, but this client's customers have a regional aspect to them, so I wanted to understand that.

First thing was persuading the client to put in the time to give me a download of all the customers' postcodes.

Then it was a simple matter of ordering them in a spreadsheet and working out the frequencies. Bearing in mind a postcode covers just a handful of houses, if we then work out the most popular postcode is, say, (I've changed the data so I'm not giving away my client's info) LN6 0SP, nowadays we can use Google StreetView to pretty much actually see the clients' house. You can all-but see them through their window sat watching telly.

Then, we can look at the income and habits of that client using UpMyStreet which provides a link between postcodes and the ACORN classifications. Collecting those we can work out the most common ACORN classification for our clients.

From there, we can extrapolate people's concerns .. if you live in a council terrace as a single parent you have different concerns to well off managers living in larger houses.

Once you know how to 'speak to' your customers' concerns, you can buy ads on Facebook to reach people by geography, age, sex, marital status, and interests.

Of course, you can follow people on Twitter by geography.

All, besides the Facebook PPC ads, for nothing. We really do live in amazing times.

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My new Twitter rules now we have 'Who to follow'

2010-08-07: If you use Twitter, you might have noticed a new "Who to follow" section near the top of the right hand column that suggests who you might want to follow.

Presumably they suggest people who are active and are well connected to you. People your friends follow, and so on.

From a usability perspective, there's a cross next to the names it suggests. I'm unsure whether clicking it means they'll never come up again, or if it just dismisses it for now. I've certainly clicked someone's cross and had it replaced by the other suggestion on display, providing me with two recommendations to friend the one person. You'd have thought Twitter would have programmed that a little better.

I saw someone else moan that it suggests people that we've previously unfriended.

Anyway, the suggestions have generally been good and it's made me use Twitter more.

However, from an Internet marketers' perspective, whereas in the golden age you could send out a tweet to your followers and because there weren't that many others tweeting and people were excited, they'd see your tweet and consider it, nowadays people follow lots of others so our messages fly past and are only fleetingly considered. Response rates are lower. That makes it even more important for us to create a genuine dialogue. We were never supposed to be broadcasting anyway (I never was, I was generalising earlier).

Anyway, as a user, I don't really want to switch on Twitter to find a load of stuff from people I don't care about, so now we have "who to follow" I think I'd better also take an active role in unfollowing people who are, frankly, not providing interesting Tweets.

So my new Twitter routine is this.

• Load Twitter
• Consider friending whoever is suggested
• Read through the tweets on the first page
• Unfollow anyone who says nomnomnom or says they nommed some food (eg. "just nommed Cornish Pastie"). The word is 'eaten' and we have nothing in common.
• Try really hard to reply to something
• If there's really nothing interesting there to respond to, unfollow someone on that page
• Do something useful
• In the event of something taking a while to load, maybe check Twitter or make a cup of tea

I also check, once a day if I remember (so, probably once a week), who has recently followed me and decide whether to follow them back. And I probably check who has mentioned me more than once a day, and who's sent me a private message maybe once every other day.

Turn that around and you know what you have to do as a tweeter for business: connect, converse, be interesting, and be focussed.

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Equity

2010-10-09: I had wondered what underwater drilling would sound like, and this isn't it. This is more like scrabbling, as if we'd sunk a rat inside an empty beer barrel.

Other than that the night is still. There's an owl and some other scurrying on the opposite bank. Airbubbles breaking the surface. The moonlight shows ripples. That's about it.

My mind wanders until a short tube and a rubber head break the surface with a startling exhalation and splash to the side where other rubber people help their colleague out of the water. Silently .. well, as silently as three men in wetsuits and flippers can be .. we make our way along the towpath to the car park where someone opens a flask while others squelch out of their suits, expose themselves to the night air, and become ordinary people with biscuit crumbs and stubble.

There's Simon, Ade and Ian, all members of The Sons Of Egerton, named after Francis Egerton who commissioned the first modern British canal and inspired by The Sons Of Glyndwr, the Welsh nationalists who burned English holiday homes in the mid 80s.

It's 2014 and the ConDems have long since sold the big and diverse water-borne society husbanded by British Waterways to Stagecoach which ramped up the cost of living on the waterways until the wayward souls who had collected there for decades left for caravan parks. They were replaced by people with shining 4x4s and children called Jonty and Beatrice who enjoyed their new freedom a couple of times a year and otherwise left the waterways pulse-free.

What I'd just witnessed was a political act. The British don't do suicide bombing, we do passive aggression, strong immobility. Here the only weapon was a hand drill used to puncture the hull of a new narrowboat with a small 1/8" hole. It would sink over maybe a week until only its faux chimney poked above the surface.

This is how the law works. Karma. Equity theory. What goes around comes around until we all feel in balance. A second, much larger, economy. Take and we will take. Give, and you will receive.

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Laurie Anderson's inheritance tracks

2010-08-01: For those who haven't caught it, Radio 4's "Saturday Live" (9am Saturdays) features a lovely idea called inheritance tracks where they ask someone in the public eye to choose a piece of music they feel they inherited from their parents, and one they'd like to pass on to their children. Isn't that a fabulous idea?

Anyway, this Saturday's I loved. Laurie Anderson, famous sound and performance artist, recently married Lou Reed. Imagine. Lou Reed! What inheritance tracks would Laurie choose? I loved it.

Find out here.

It seems to be playing up for me atm but I think it's around three quarters of the way through the programme.

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How do you measure the results of search engine optimisation (SEO)?

2010-11-22: Search engine optimisation is a set of techniques for raising you in Google's natural or organic search results so that you get more traffic to your website.

Google's organic search is still the top deliverer of website traffic.

So one thing you could measure is the increased traffic.

The most common way of doing that is to open a Google Analytics account and install the bit of software they give you onto every page of your website (your web developer knows how).

Once that's done, you just log into Analytics every day and you can see how many visitors you've had.

You can compare date periods, and you can look at only the traffic that came from search engines, only that which came through organic search, and finally, you can see which search phrases the searcher used to find you, and you can select the phrase you want to study and see the results.

So let's say you've been doing some SEO work on "HP Printer Inks", you can compare the traffic arriving to your website after typing in that phrase in a period before you started your work to the traffic after and Analytics will tell you your percentage improvement.

The problem is, traffic is one thing, what if people don't like what they see? What if, in trying to optimise your website, you've made it a worse experience for visitors?

We really must be careful what we measure, and in this case it would probably be better to measure enquiries because that takes into account any rise in traffic along with any rise in your conversion rate. Just to explain that .. if 1 person fills in your enquiry form or buys something or joins your newsletter for every 100 visitors, you have a 1% conversion rate. Relatively minor changes can have a major effect on your conversion rate, so your SEO changes are likely to have an effect and it could be good or bad.

Analytics uses the idea of a 'goal'. Let's assume you want more traffic on "HP printer inks" because you want to sell those products, so you would set up your 'thank-you for purchasing' page as a goal in Analytics. Then you can track how many people arriving on your target search phrase purchased products.

Actually Analytics goes further. If you have an ecommerce store you can send Analytics the value of the order and the products purchased so it can report in more detail on which are your most profitable products, keyphrases, days, times of day/month and the rest.

So, how do you measure the results of SEO? Probably the best measure will be the increase in enquiries from the key phrases you have been targeting.

Presumably you also know the cost of an enquiry across your marketing efforts, so you can also compare SEO with the rest of your campaign.

The only problem with that is that SEO is like a branding ad .. the benefits come over the next few years because SEO position, once achieved, tends to be fairly stable, barring Google's fairly regular convulsions.

For example, if you start an SEO campaign .. they tend to be ongoing .. and it rumbles on for six months and you take a measure and see that enquiries from it are costing £5 each, and you know that your regular magazine ads are only costing £3 I wouldn't be too concerned because if you switch off your ads you've got nothing. If you switch off SEO, you've still got free enquiries coming in over the next few years. What you're doing with SEO is adding energy to your flywheel.

The other thing with SEO is that the higher you get in the search engines, the higher are your rewards. 42% of clicks go to the number one position. So your SEO rewards come later and an SEO campaign should be a continual part of your promotional programme.

So you should be choosing your target keyphrases very very carefully, taking into account competition, traffic volume, relevance, and your current ability to satisfy that traffic, in order to get the best results for your investment. Otherwise you could be spending money and not getting anywhere, or spending money and getting top positions for worthless search phrases.

So ..that's how you measure the results of an SEO campaign for budgetary assessment. For diagnostics and continual improvement, it's not just enquiries .. everything's relevant: time on page, bounce rate, number of pages seen, geography, time of day .. everything .. but that's another story.

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Here's how not to blog (IMHO)

2010-09-25: Here's a popular way to do Internet marketing that I don't agree with.

I won't credit them with links but in my capacity as Internet marketer for some local Scarborough businesses that benefit from tourism (B&Bs, hotels, shops, restaurants and so on) I monitor mentions of Scarborough appearing around the web.

Fairly regularly (maybe twice a week) there's a fairly poor quality blog about some specific aspect of Scarborough written by someone who, I would guess, has never been here. Here's the sort of thing I mean http://www.orleanshotellasvegas.org/planning-a-group-scarborough-holiday/. That link, Scarborough Holiday, goes to Hackness Grange Hotel http://www.hacknessgrangehotel.co.uk/ so I guess they are the paymaster for the strategy.

So, let's think about that orleans hotel blog for a minute. It's clearly not about the Orleans Hotel Las Vegas, if that exists. Whoever's created it presumably has chosen that phrase because people search for it, and is hoping to a) get a position in Google for that phrase .. which he does, position 6 .. and then b) to distract people from their original purpose (presumably to book a room or whatever) and get them into booking a holiday in Scarborough or to switch their cellphone contract.

There are 269 pages in that blog, written since April 16th .. so 23 weeks, about 12 blog entries per week.

Curiously, despite that position in Google search, the blog's home page has no PageRank (Google's assessment of the blog's reputation .. a few of my website pages are PR3 (out of 10)). A link from a PR3 page is worth about 4,000 PR0 links.

There's a thing called spinning, which is where you write your blog/weblog like this, with slashes/forward slashes to provide alternative/different words and then you run your text/story/blog entry/copy through a spinner/editor/processor/programme which spits out/creates/writes multiple/many versions/different versions of your text. I'll stop that now. The idea is you can then send different versions to different websites that accept such things. Google knows when it sees the same article several times, so this is a way to get around that and persuade Google that these are each original articles.

I like to think of Google as a God-like figure. What does Google want? For each and every searcher and every query in whatever language or country, it wants to provide the best links to its users. Its business lives or dies on that. And Google knows when someone clicks a link and comes straight back to Google. Google thinks "ah, that didn't work for that reader, I won't do that again". If someone on Facebook or Twitter puts up a link to a blog, Google thinks "ah, the humans like it, I'll put it higher". In these ways all of us help Google work out what's good and what's not.

The other part of the God thing is .. stop trying to understand Google. They change their programme more than once a day and they employ people with brains the size of sofas so you're never going to manage it. And Google is all knowing. They know where you click, they know where you go. Google knows what you are doing. So stop trying to pull the wool over its eyes.

All Google wants is great links. If you are the best plumber in town .. genuinely .. Google will put you at the top. You get what you deserve, basically.

So the best strategy for getting to the top of Google isn't an SEO strategy at all, it's this: "be brilliant". Here you go: a Lanterna review in The Telegraph. Lanterna is an Italian restaurant in Scarborough with a great reputation. Did he get that by writing crappy blogs rehashed from the words left over after proper writers had left the room? No. No doubt the guy's a culinary genius who has dedicated his life to being the best he can be. The restaurant is always full, meals aren't cheap and Ayckbourn and people from the Independent dine there ... because it's the real deal. Maybe he employs a PR company to encourage those stories, I'd like to think it's pure reputation.

Anyway, back to that Las Vegas blog. Given that these articles basically rehash available information, they look spun, and the ones Google highlights to me (which will exclude those Google thinks are duplicates) are in blogs with no following, I think we can assume Hackness Grange has purchased a cheap blogging system as part of a link building campaign.

Is it working? Of course, we don't know from this quick analysis what else they are working on, particularly which keyphrases, but they are on page 4 of Google for Scarborough Holiday while my client is on about page 8. They have about 5 times the links that I have. But the top result for that search has a link count halfway between us.

Any conclusions? Nothing specific here, except maybe we have to fall back on our own values. I believe in adding value to the Internet, giving back. If I'm involved, I will be writing good, useful articles and placing them in places where the audience is looking for what I'm writing about. That way we are not just getting links to try to fool Google, we are genuinely helping people with our local or specialist knowledge and advice.

Hackness Grange Hotel looks beautiful. I'd start with some brand values about quality and go from there. Maybe big places just have to fill their rooms. Look at The Grand, iconic Victorian hotel that markets itself like Pontins.

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Rainstorm cometh at Goswick campsite

2010-08-09: The first evening of our recent camping trip at Goswick, Northumberland. This storm came over the hill and stayed the night (20 July 2010).

The correct music to accompany this is P J Harvey's Meet Ze Monsta

Here's the middle-of-the-night raining & camping video from that night.

Camping prev

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Business improved x5.46

2010-10-23: In the interests of being able to quote specific figures I won't name the client, but I have a client who runs a small business for whom I created a small, cheap, one page website at minimal cost.

Later, I added Google Analytics. That (free) software shows me how many people are arriving on the website, where from, and where they go on the site.

It provides a figure called the bounce rate, which is the percentage of people who arrive on a website who leave immediately .. you've done it yourself I'm sure, locked in 'search mode' you click a search result, instantly know that's not what you want and hit the back button.

For this client, 72% of visitors bounced. Over 9 months they got 255 visitors who were searching generically in a search engine for what my client provides (rather than searching for the client's name .. those people already know about my client), so only 69 people actually stuck around and thought maybe my client could help with whatever problem they were trying to solve.

So I suggested we needed to expand the website to give visitors a reason to stay. So we created pages for the major search terms that people might enter into Google if they wanted what my client sold, the cost was a mere £205.

The result .. 9 months forward? 399 visitors, a bounce rate of 23%, meaning 308 of those generic, Google searchers stuck around on the site, an increase of times 5.46.

That's not it. Obviously clients have to work within their means but that sort of improvement is just the very start of what's possible. The magic comes from sticking at it and continually pushing, because then you're into compound interest: if we can improve things x5 next year and x5 the year after that then we're really getting somewhere.

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50% increase in website conversion from two sentences

2010-11-18: I'm working on a website that I've inherited. It's pitiful to look at, but it converts. Well, it did convert at 2% and I just know that if I make it all spangly and new, that conversion will die off. It looks honest at the moment.

Plus, it ranks number one here and in the US for many key phrases.

So I changed just two sentences and now it converts at 3%.

Basically the idea is, you land on the home page and it says .. well, let me make up an example. Let's say it's a cure for halitosis. So on page one it says "halitosis is this and affects that blah introduction blah" and at the bottom it says "have you got bad breath?"

On page two it says "if you've got halitosis, everyone hates you, you won't get a job or a partner, you'll die poor and lonely etc." and at the end it says "are you ready to cure your halitosis?"

Page three says "I used to have halitosis, but I cured it with this five step programme, here are the steps" and ends with "buy now".

The changes I made were those two link texts from page 1 to 2, and 2 to 3. Previously they said something like "find out more .. ".

So the reason I changed the wording? The law of consistency.

If the reader clicks the link to say they've got bad breath, they've agreed they've got bad breath. If they click to say they are ready to cure their halitosis, then they are saying they are ready to cure their halitosis. So when the cure is maybe £25 or so .. to reject that is a big deal. What, are you a cheapskate, or a liar? You said you had halitosis. You said you were ready to cure your halitosis. So now what you're saying is, you clicked those two previous links on false pretences. No, there's a strong motivation to buy the product.

Once we take an action, we are pulled to be consistent with that action.

50% increase in conversion from a few minute's work.

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Narrowboat tales 10

2010-07-30: Sweatyhocks. That's a name that featured throughout my childhood. Pronounced with a silent 'h'. I don't think I ever met him, but he was someone my dad knew at work. Sweatyhocks because he had the smelliest feet. At my dad's workplace (might have been Stanton) where everyone showered at the end of the shift, people used to try to get in before him because of the smell.

I wonder if it was Sweatyhocks who took a urine sample to the doctor one day, then the day after brought the milk for his tea in the same bottle.

It's not much of a story, but Sweatyhocks is such a great name I wanted to write it anyway :-)

prev

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Support, Truss and trust

2010-08-16: Back to Talk to the Hand, Lynne Truss' book about the rudeness of modern life, and she's talking about the Internet where she makes the point that many businesses have pushed self service too far.

Given that most transactions are mutually beneficial, wouldn't it be nice one day to be met halfway? The Internet, she says is "the supreme example of an impersonal and inflexible system which will provide information if you do all the hard work of searching for it, but crucially a) doesn't promise anything as a reward for all the effort, b) will never engage in dialogue, c) is much bigger than you are, and d) only exists in a virtual kind of way so never has to apologise."

She continues: "Our spirits are .. half broken. We have even started to believe that clicking "OK" is an act of free will, while 'Quit' and 'Retry' represent true philosophical alternatives. Fuming resentment is the result. Everywhere we turn for a bit of help we are politely instructed to find the solution for ourselves."

Now, she writes very effectively for comic effect but I do take her main point and have felt the same way many times.

So the reason for me putting this up is to say that we can get too wrapped up in how brilliant the latest widget is and forget that most of everyone just wants a bit of straightforward human interaction. Service is a differentiator. If that's how people feel about your website and your competitors', that's fine to a point. But you could blow away your competitors with some decent customer service, and get yourself a long-term, loyal customer base.

Incidentally, this ties in with something I picked out of an episode of Big Brother last night. The show is in its last couple of weeks and two different people said at different times of different people that they didn't trust them. The reason? They haven't got to know them as much as the other people.

Remember our old brain and the idea of the self? The old brain is interested in sex, food and danger, and our concept of a sense of self may just be an evolved by-product of our need to understand what the other guy is about to do. We meet someone or something, and we model them in our head. We try to understand, basically, whether they are going to try to eat us, have sex with us, or help us. The fact that we are modelling others means we may as well model ourselves too so we can work out the whole situation, and that model of ourselves is our sense of self.

Anyway, what they were saying in Big Brother is that they didn't trust someone basically because they hadn't had enough interaction with them to build a reliable model of them in their heads. So they couldn't yet predict how they would behave.

Brands are simple people. They're not complicated. Volvo will always prioritise safety and Mercedes engineering. Easy to predict.

But in order to trust a brand (a company) and to buy from it, we need some interactions.

So you could turn frustrated customers into thankful, trusting and loyal ones with some half-decent interactions.

Now, I know that face to face or phone interactions with real people are awfully expensive. You need nice, capable, chipper and well trained people to face customers who ask the same disheartening questions day after day.

Enter social media. If a customer asks you a question on Twitter or Facebook or a forum or in a YouTube comment or on your real-life FAQ and you answer it, others see that you really do react well and answer questions properly and solve people's problems. That stands in for their own questions, their own interactions. Now instead of needing, say, 9 brand interactions involving your staff, say half of those are covered by the prospect seeing your interactions with others in social media.

"Pick your own strawberries" "No I won't bloody pick my own strawberries!"

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Can you outsource a blog?

2010-12-17: A colleague of mine who runs a small events company wants to create a blog but is concerned that they may not have enough to say and wonders whether a blog can be outsourced. A social media expert has said 'definitely not, it has to be your authentic voice'. Here's the advice I gave.

I agree about the authentic voice to a point, but that can go too far, I've done it myself. If you start to blog your political views (and you're not a politician) or what you ate for tea (and you're not a chef) then you're in trouble.

On the other hand, one company that built its brand on great writing and lost its way when it changed is Lush. From memory, about 15 years ago or so, they wrote so very well about their products you could just dive right in and rub it all over. I don't think that was the company founder writing, it was a great copywriter. It was never the same after whatever happened happened (but something did, and it was never the same :-) ).

Of course, writing is a skill, too. If you're great at writing, fabulous, play to your strengths but with the caveat "are you going to write and perform the company song and design the logo too?" If not, perhaps the most efficient and effective thing to do would be to brief a writer and approve what they write. Alternatively you really can just outsource the whole lot. 9/10 times it'll be rubbish, but the 1:10 times it works, it's fabulous .. you just have to be careful who you use and how you guide them and of course you get what you pay for.

Those rubbish blogs: they still work. You get three things from a blog. 1) your blog page appears in Google because it's the only piece of text on the web about how to predict the weather from the number of times Holly Willoughby blinks per minute that morning .. someone clicks, reads it, and clicks through to your money page to buy something .. so, traffic is one benefit. 2) The link from your blog to your money page raises your money page in Google search, and 3) those who read your blog should find themselves more motivated to buy from you because you've addressed their exact needs. If the text isn't the best thing you've ever read, it's still delivering links to your money pages, so it's still worth something. Don't get me wrong, I'm not advocating that. I'm saying .. if you look around at some top performing websites you'll see they sometimes have snoringly boringly blogs. Don't start thinking you should copy that. A better blog is better. A great blog is seriously good. But a crap blog still delivers some benefits. The other take-home from that is, as with many things online .. just start. You'll improve.

Anyway, I digress, I wanted to make two key points, so here goes:

Important point #1: the fine line

There is a very, very fine line to tread. What you want is to be useful. To be useful you really must know your customers and to do that means listening .. I'm sure you're with me on that. So actually a blog is about answering your customers' questions before they ask them, anticipating their needs. Inspiration comes from having a pad beside the phone to jot the questions new enquirers ask, from carrying a dictaphone when you're out to note any client-led inspirations .. it's for when the wedding photographer tells you that the diffuse light from a marquee makes for great pics and you think .. aha!. It's also from watching the keyphrase traffic on your website and through Google to see what people are looking for that you can write about. It's from watching your market. It's usually better to write about your customers than to write about you, and in that there is probably infinite inspiration.

Important point #2: blogging isn't everything

Blogging isn't everything. If you find something you might want to blog about, you could do a youTube video about it. Podcast it. Press release it. Write a website page about it. Tweet about it. Photograph it and put it on your Facebook Page. And yes you could blog it. You could do all of those things with your one story. Or, you could take your story and do with it what you are comfortable with or what suits your product. So if you can't quite get the blog thing together but you are happy to talk to a portable video camera .. you've got yourself a YouTube channel.

Start with whatever medium you feel most comfortable with and get used to watching for stories and developing them. Do it regularly.

If it comes to blogging, and what you're most comfortable with is briefing someone over the phone while driving .. then it's your story, but you're just asking someone to put the words together.

As for an authentic voice, I think that's about branding. With a relatively small company that can be one person, but of course companies like McDonalds or Volvo hire writers and actors all the time and, like professionals, they stick to the brand character. You may not have that triffically well defined, but a good writer will listen for your brand values and deliver them to your audience and could do that even better than you. Of course, though, a £5/hr writer won't be doing any listening for brand character so you get what you pay for.

I may have given a slightly flippant view of blogging. That's not how I feel about it though. I think it's a powerful way to the top of Google, and a fabulous way to develop your business, to convert browsers into customers and customers into lifelong advocates. Actually, it's my favourite online marketing strategy, so yes, do it. Then do it well. Then do it fabulously. If you need any help, just yell.

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Cognitive surplus .. can we be bothered?

2010-08-17: Twenty or thirty years ago I'd have been excited to read Clay Shirky's new book Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age. I'm definitely a glass half full kinda guy.

I would love to live by De Bono's Handbook for the Positive Revolution. Actually more than anything I want George Monbiot's Manifesto for A New World Order to happen. I even tried to follow that through and his 'answer' seemed to be "Oh, don't talk to me about actually doing it, I'm a thinker you know".

People can't be arsed, in a nutshell. If our basic needs are satisfied, there's something good on the telly, and we've got the latest iPhone we're happy. Why would we want the hassle of creating a new world order?

Partly, that's the success (and failure) of marketing. As marketers our job is to discover people's wants (probably before they themselves know of them) and provide for them, with a little bit of an aspirational osmotic pressure added. So we're kinda happy, shielded from what's going on by politicians and companies who tell us what they know we want to hear, and in some ways that's good. Who wants mayhem and unhappiness? Who really wants to leave our sofas and big tellies? By and large we like our lives.

But it's not enough. We know. We all know we're being royally screwed, we just don't quite know how to deal with it. Best to ignore it. These are huge forces of oppression at work, after all. And didn't the feminists die early because of all the stress they endured?

It's Brave New World, basically.

Wondering what to get excited about? Isn't everything basically OK? Here some unfinished lyrics by The Edger, a rapper in Scarborough:

Contradictions

A man who claims hes hard all his life
Then goes home beats the shit out his wife
The law is there to protect us all
but everyone they put behind bars is poor
...Prison works we lock 'em up like a trend
only 96% will then re-offend
the recession working people get homelessness
Those that caused give themselves bonuses
A soldier turning a family of 5 to zero
But when he's injured comes home a hero
Anarchists demanding more choices for their brain
and demonstrate their freedom by dressing all the same
ya can't be a priest if you sleep with men
but you can stay a priest if they are under ten
beautiful intelligent creative people
who make their brain insane in their vain shoving a needle......making them evil

Have a read of Life Inc: How the World Became a Corporation and How to Take it Back and realise that making friends, connecting with others, is a revolutionary act.

How does this fit with me being a marketer? I don't see any difference between helping a friend move his furniture and marketing. Both are about perceiving a need and organising yourself to help solve it. I'm pro small businesses. People who serve real needs. For me marketing is the most powerful force for good because it can take every one of those problems above and organise to provide a solution. Your nearest muttlynational burger chain isn't going to do that. Marketing isn't just for business. Money is about money. Marketing is about building a better world. I see a lot of needs. We're not done here yet.

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Confused by owls? Cut your owl confusion by 50%, impress your friends

2010-08-21: If I'm allowed more than one special power (and I'm sure I am), one would be to be able to recognise birds by their song. To that end, here's how to tell the difference between the different owls by sound alone. If you're a mouse, don't worry about it, you won't hear a thing (owls wings make no noise as they swoop down to eat you). Ain't evolution a wonderful thing?

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Blogging and RSS

2010-09-15: RSS is probably a great thing to add to your website. If it's not appropriate, it means there's something wrong with your website, not that RSS is wrong for you.

The point of writing a blog isn't just to write a great blog and have people stumble over it, find you fascinating and in a combined New Avengers-style hypnotic trance / fit of gratitude that you actually understand, pop along to your website to buy something. Although it's nice when that happens.

The point about a blog is that you are writing news content. There are people out there who want news content. So you let them publish your news in return for a link to your website.

Links to your website are good, right? They go a long way to getting you a great position in the search results.

How do those sites know when you have news, when you've written something new on your blog? You syndicate it through Really Simple Syndication .. RSS.

Basically RSS is a file on your website in an agreed RSS format. It contains a summary of your latest news along with a link to the full story. When you create some new content, the software you use notifies various search and aggregation services such as technorati or syndic8 (more here) which get the link to your new content from your RSS file, read the content, and publish your story .. along with a link to you .. on their website, email list or whatever they provide.

Other websites, whether to inform or entertain a particular readership or for the ad revenue, pull content together from RSS feeds and other sources to automatically create magazine-style websites. So a gardening site might pull in hot news from various RSS sources. If they like you, you could be a news source for them.

When all that's set up, it means the benefit of your blog is multiplied because not only have you got your own blog website, but you are appearing among other news on other people's websites too, to their targeted readers.

You can have multiple RSS feeds on your site. If you run a gardening site you might run one for news and another for new products, but you could split that and have feeds on all sorts of things: vegetables, flowers, container gardening, whatever.

So, if you've got a blog, that's not **it**, that's just step one of about four. Step two is where you syndicate. And that's not it either. Then your blog competes for attention against everyone else. So you'd better be good (regular, interesting, succinct, different, entertaining or controversial). Above all, you'd better make a difference to your reader. Change their actions. You're an educator. Here to make the world better one reader at a time. So get to it.

Steps 3 & 4 are different modalities and user interaction but those are for another day and another blog.

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The Yorkshire Mafia

2010-02-26: I got a strong feeling that many business-people's new year's resolution was to use Linked-In more. On mySpace you can talk about how awesome club nights are, on Facebook your Auntie's probably on there so you share your holiday snaps, recommend scented candle shops and wonder aloud about whether you should get a pet piglet. Twitter is for live chatalong with reality TV and updates about the morning's commute, while on Linked-In you wear your suit .. it's business only.

That was tongue-in-cheek btw, I've had lots of business from Twitter. I'm just reflecting back people's views of the different services. I spoke to a friend and business colleague yesterday and he honestly can't see how Twitter would be useful to him.

Anyway, at the start of the year I did get a sense that people in business had gotten the measure of Facebook, tried Twitter, and were now ready for LinkedIn. I was one of them.

So I'm trying a few things out and one prevailing means to success is, apparently, to help people out and give things away. I'm concerned that what will happen is that will become a popular and then trite way of carrying on as the recipients begin to recognise an 'is there anything I can do to help?' as the beginning of a sales process, that once you accept help you also accept an obligation to reciprocate. What may well be a genuine offer to help may become poisoned by becoming a known sales technique. Sad, because I always feel genuine. Maybe everyone does.

Anyway, apparently Linked-In groups are a great way to connect with people, and answering and asking questions are too, so I got invited to join the Yorkshire Mafia which appears to be a networking group aiming to promote the doing of business within Yorkshire. There's a lot of this about, I see it when working on TweetCloser, lots of Chambers of Commerce activities promoting regional business. But this is a genuinely popular group promoting the real strengths of an area so, nothing wrong with that.

Yesterday was a Mafia meetup in a hard-to-get-to hotel in a bit of Leeds reminiscent of the bit where Corro Roy was nearly drowned then saved, and preceded by an unprotected bit of canal in the middle of the plaza area in a direct line from where you enter the plaza to the entrance to the hotel (honest, lookee see for yourself (obviously it wasn't built yet when that aerial shot was taken, but that canal is completely unguarded and unannounced. Could easily text-"hello love, finally found the hotel, aaaargh"-phone-amble yourself into the dark waters of the canal, I'll have nightmares about that)).

It was full and hot and friendly and contained so many tall people I thought I was in Amsterdam. Perhaps Linked-In promotes growth. Being a Linked-In-driven group it had a higher proportion of Internet marketers than exists in the real world. So, it was nice to meet other likeminded souls but it might have been nicer to meet people I could trade with. There was the chap who ran The Devil's Guide to IT in a black suit, red tie, and sunglasses, and the man with the best Twitter tale I heard all night, Dan Sumption who, working on iPlayer programming for the BBC, was able to tweet a bug-complainant to say "I fixed it, try it now". How cool is that? You're sat at home watching i-Player, something goes wrong and you report it, then .. not customer services, but the actual programmer, tweets you and says "thanks, try it now, I've fixed it". That direct connection and immediacy is, for me, the essence of Twitter.

As for Linked-In advice from a roomful of Linked-In users? One devotes an hour a day to using it and has lots of work from it. Seems like a lot of time. The social media guru lady at VentureFest talked of maybe a quarter of an hour each morning. That sounded optimistic at the time, though.

So yes, a good gathering, certainly popular, and everyone's genuine about working with each other. There's certainly a lot of reason to, and with such talent in Yorkshire very little reason to look to London for anything much .. Trooping The Colour maybe. I'm pleased to be part of it and I'll keep you informed.

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The story of me, Marigold and customer loyalty

2010-02-23: I've never been a fan of dishwashers. I don't like the smell when you open it up to put more dirty dishes in. I don't like the 'extra' job of bending down to load and unload it. I don't like the feel of crockery washed in a dishwasher, and I certainly don't want to pre-wash my pots before I put them in the washer. Then there's the maintenance, the scary limescale buildup and having to care and maintain the dishwasher, and the electricity and water it uses.

So I'd like to say I wash up but obviously I just leave the dishes around the kitchen until it looks like some industrial plant that closed down a decade ago, then I wash up.

Detergent dries my skin and gives me a rash, so I've taken to wearing rubber gloves. Incidentally according to Wikipedia these were invented in the 60s by William Halsted who also removed his mothers gallstone on the kitchen table, turned himself and his colleagues into cocaine addicts by experimenting with its anaesthetic properties and performed the first radical mastectomy.

One day I bought generic rubber gloves. They were slippy. It turned washing up into a risky business, every pot and glass needed a two-hand transfer to safely make it from bowl to drainer. So I decided, only Marigolds would do. They are non-slip. I became loyal to Marigold because they offered something others didn't.

In the meantime, we have rather taken to shopping at Aldi. It's quick, simple, the staff are happy, and the other shoppers are, by and large, polite. However, they don't sell Marigolds.

So yesterday after my thumb had poked through my existing pair for long enough, I set out for the corner shop to buy some new ones and they didn't sell Marigolds, but they did sell Happy Shopper gloves with, according to the packaging, a non-slip grip. Happy Shopper bad, non-slip grip good. I thought I'd take a punt.

Back at home, I'm back to the two-handed transfer. The gloves said they had a non-slip grip, but, well, they may have, but it's nothing like that provided by Marigolds.

Customer loyalty

So where does all that get us? It gets us to the complexity of reputation, branding and loyalty. Clearly I have a strong loyalty to Marigold gloves because I've found I break fewer pots when I use them. I've found them to suit my needs better. Perhaps if people want to clean the toilet wearing Happy Shopper gloves, it matters less if they are non-slip.

Happy Shopper .. well I've never had a good relationship with that brand. I don't think I need to elaborate.

My loyalty to Aldi, of course, has gone down a notch for making me go through all that fuss. And the local Costcutter too .. I'm only loyal to that because it's my closest shop.

But here's the big deal, and it's happening a zillion times a day every day for all of us. I lost a little trust in being sold to. I'd love to think that sales people were primarily good and there to help me find a suitable solution (dream on Allsopp), and that when a package says it has a non-slip grip that means what it contains has a non-slip grip. But it turns out non-slip grips are relative and I bought a product that disappointed. I feel bad about that. And that feeling is transferred to my customer loyalty or otherwise to Happy Shopper.

How do you, as an online business person, get a grip (har har) on the ebb and flow of your customers' loyalty? Most people, even if you asked them, would just grunt "they're shit" at you if you asked how they felt about the rubber gloves they bought last week. Yet, it's really, really important information for you.

Customer loyalty and usability

One way would be to do a usability test. Get a group of people to use your website and report back to you how they felt. Usability tests are amazing. No-one believes me when I say that .. it's something I offer that no-one buys. I think it's because my sophisticated clients think, well, "what can a bunch of ordinary people tell me about my website that I don't already know?" And the answer? I promise you'll be surprised. I promise what they tell you will change your business. I absolutely promise it make your business more profitable. Usability studies make my jaw drop by pointing out what is in retrospect blindingly obvious. But only in retrospect. It gives focus to your efforts to build customer loyalty by reframing your efforts from the customers' perspective.

Anyway, since you still won't do a usability test even though they are quick, cheap, I have usability testers waiting for your business, they'll revolutionise your website and cause peace and harmony throughout this land, you might like to build customer loyalty by checking your numbers.

Building customer loyalty by playing the numbers game

OK, the local Costcutter might be tied somehow to Happy Shopper, but let's imagine for a minute they are not, and they are selling online. They'll be able to measure whether people buy their rubber gloves twice, and compare that to the average re-buy rate for products in their shop. So, what if they try to build customer loyalty by creating a policy of taking the ten products in their shop with the worst re-purchase rate and either replacing them with a different brand, or even better, testing them alongside another brand.

By selling two types of rubber glove and checking what percentage of customers bought the products again, then in the end keeping the winning glove that had the best customer loyalty, they are not just improving the sales and profitability of their rubber gloves, they are improving their brand by providing their customers with what they want. And it may be they clean toilets with their rubber gloves so they want the cheaper glove. We don't know. But we can test and find out.

In supplying what the customer wants, we get fewer bad experiences linked to our brand, and more good experiences. And the customer will be slightly more willing to pop into the shop .. more loyal, in other words. Perhaps they come back for that particular brand of rubber glove they know works for them, and while they are there they buy some other stuff too. And if those other things have been tested among the shop's customers too, we are starting to build customer loyalty.

OK, zoom out. What have we done? We've harnessed our customers to help us improve our shop. Our customers don't know it, we haven't gotten in their way, we haven't asked them to complete a questionnaire or phoned them in the evening or asked them to ring a bell on the way out of the shop. We just watched and learned from their behaviour.

Websites allow you to collect information on your customers like never before. So use it. It's a massive force for good.

It's consistent with the whole social media thing because it blurs the boundaries between us the business and them the customers. Here we've roped in our customers to give us feedback so we can improve our business and build loyalty, and they don't even know it.

I think this comes before pushing into social media. I might, in my Facebook status write "I'm a Marigold man", or "pah, Happy Shopper non-slip gloves are slippy". I might even start a tongue in cheek group called "I use Marigolds". The good and the bad get talked about. Marigolds get my vote. Happy Shopper and Costcutters don't. Better to be doing a good job before courting social media.

Of course, social media can be used to get feedback too, in fact the best way to use social media is to listen, rather than to speak, but that's for another day. For now, two things. 1) Every customer experiences you differently, and you can manage that if you 2) watch the numbers and test everything.

Or you could do a usability test. But you won't. Even though it gives you special powers your competitors won't have.

I am right about usability tests, you'll see.

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Facebook ad example

2010-01-04: Marketing by numbers: I placed a Facebook ad for a client to promote their Facebook Page about one of their products which, interestingly, ranks higher than their product page on their website.

Back on the 27 September they had 5 fans and now they have 32. The ad cost £74 for over half a million displays (impressions), 208 click throughs and those extra 27 fans (if all came from the ad) so costing £2.74 per new fan. I didn't optimise the ad, it was just a quick, cheap test. The client pulled the idea before we'd made enough to test the numbers. Ideally I'd want more like 200 new fans before we could say whether it's worth working on or not.

People who visit my client's website from this Facebook page are converting into enquiries at a rate of 10%. The volume's not there, but that's a good rate.

We've had interaction on that Facebook Page. And those 208 people who saw what we do and over half a million people who possibly saw our ad, they must count for something in the same way as you think when you place an ad in a magazine about the circulation. Even a classified ad in a 500,000 circulation magazine would cost more than £74.

I doubt ads that cost ten or a hundred times as much get subjected to this much scrutiny. I know there's always pressure to tie marketing spend to results, that was there even back when I started in 1981, but it sometimes feels like those systems that can be measured by their results aren't given their due. They are quickly and easily dismissed by the results they willingly show. Whereas a magazine ad .. "ah, well, you can't measure the results, but look how many people we reached with our message".

For my money, if you can measure the results in this detail, you have a fighting chance of making it work because you can improve it, see the difference, and keep improving until it's profitable, then keep improving until it's very profitable while starting other ads and campaigns using the income stream you've generated.

There was always the rule about magazine ads that says someone has to see your ad nine times before they buy, and they only see one in three ads in a magazine. Ergo you have to print the same ad in the same magazine twenty seven times (over two years in a monthly) before you can begin to measure the results. I don't know if anyone thinks that way any more. But I certainly think that if you put a marketing activity in motion, part of the benefit is what you learn from the results. If you plant an apple tree, then change your mind and want a lawn so cut your tree down before it fruits, the fault isn't in the apple tree, it's in your approach.

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Solid Rock Cafe video

2010-04-24: If you needed any persuasion that video is a crucial part of online marketing, search for the Solid Rock Cafe on Eastborough in Scarborough.

They don't appear to have a website, but early on in position 4, among the directory listings there's are two videos including this one:

Neither are professional, high cost productions. The video above is just one guy, a low-grade camera, no lighting, a bit of preparation and gumption and some video software, the other is a series of stills. It's had well over a thousand views.

And does it make you want to eat at the Solid Rock Cafe? Absolutely (it is one of our favourite cafes here in Scarborough, anyway, but I'm sold on the video). Maybe more so than a website. Video is more emotional, there's music, there's animation, there's (almost) human contact.

So don't just think about having a website. Think as much about online video, and you don't even have to do it yourself. Try running a competition for video entries, like we did for Retro 36, you might get a gem like this:

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Narrowboat tales 9

2010-07-07: It's been a while, but I thought I'd write about something nice and relaxing and try to finish off the blog about my holiday with my dad on a narrowboat. Here's a story from that:

One of my dad's Stanton workmates called Big someone, let's call him Big Bob, was cycling home one evening on his usual route along the canal on his bike: a frame, wheels, no brakes, no gears, no lights.

Nighttime. A pea-souper fog like you used to get, fed by Stanton's chimneys.

Anyway, he couldn't see where he was going and cycled straight into a lock. The water was out, so down he went, 15 feet or so.

Dazed and in fog, he couldn't get out for ages but finally climbed up, I think, one of the gates and walked home to get a telling-off from his missus "where have you been?" It would have killed a lesser man, but that's why he was 'Big' Bob.

prev - next

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Smaller header graphic

2010-09-12: With a budget that covers about an hour a month, I'm maintaining a website that sells into the golf market and, in its niche, has a page 1, position 2-4 place in Google, which is nice. With a budget like that there's not a huge amount I can do about its position, but I can tweak the site a little.

The site design is very 1994 but the guy's a doctor and doctors aren't renowned for their graphic design skills. I think the design adds to its authenticity, and it converts at 2% so there's some evidence to support me.

However, there was a huge amateur logo at the top which took up about half of screen so a couple of months ago I reduced that by half. I just check conversions: up by 59%.

See, weeny things done on a tiny budget can make a huge difference.

So for my next trick, I'm using an influence trick called 'commitment'. There's the home page, the description of the problem page, and the buy page. So on the home page, I've changed the link to the description page so it says something like "I've got the problem, show me how to solve it". Clicking that is commitment, you're saying you have the problem. At the bottom of the description page it now says something like "I'm ready to do something about [the problem]".

Of course I'll let you know how that goes. The idea is that by the time people get to the payment page, they have said they have the problem, and they've said they are ready to solve it, so now if they don't buy the solution they are being inconsistent with themselves.

We are very sophisticated nowadays. An adverse effect might be that I just screwed up the doctor's authenticity and turned him into a sneaky salesperson. We may not know why, but we may be reticent to click those new links precisely because we don't agree with them and don't want to get into a sales staircase.

That's why we test. I'll watch the numbers and if they improve things, I'll move onwards to the next thing. If they don't, I'll revert and try something else.

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'Live' tube train map

2010-07-01: A 'live' tube train map is the sort of thing you can do with government data, if they'll only let us at it.

John Naughton wrote about it and yes, it's amazing what a few hours of programming time can do if the stars all line up right.

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Local websites for a national company

2010-09-16: I just wanted to record the way Unblocked Drains Scarborough had approached the problem of being a national company wanting local coverage.

A common way forward is for companies to provide a list of the places they serve, and I've seen that be a complete gazetteer of the UK, which doesn't seem right. Here's a description in the Google search results: "We also ship granite tiles to: Canterbury, Bath and North East Somerset, Sheffield, Tameside, Fife, Scarborough, Broadland, South Kesteven, East Lindsey" .. as an attempt to appear local that doesn't seem to work. That must affect the clickthrough rates from Google.

If you take a look at Unblocked Drains York you can see that this company has opted to adapt a core website according to location.

They've bought a different domain name for each area, which might get expensive. An alternative would be to create subdomains on a single domain name, so if he could get BlockedDrain.co.uk then he could create scarborough.blockeddrain.co.uk and york.blockeddrain.co.uk free of charge, Local-Drains.co.uk has done it that way, here's their York version.

If that location was stored in a database, he could watch his traffic and add any location he wanted within seconds.

And obviously the location is strewn throughout the text automatically.

It might be good to vary some of the other text too so Google didn't cotton on.

With his method, everyone gets their own email address, but with mine you could just use scarborough@blockeddrain.co.uk.

Anyway, I just liked the approach and wanted to note it.

Incidentally, I used to work with MapInfo where one of the problems they solved was how to equalise sales regions .. rather like I understand they are planning to equalise the parliamentary constituencies here in the UK. You could use whatever data you liked but, for instance, you could slice up the UK into chunks of 10,000 people. I suspect unblockeddrains won't be doing exactly that as basically it leads to towns being split between sales regions, confusion and resentment because it's too complicated, but they will need at least clearly to manage where those regions are, and MapInfo lets you do that. Well, it did when I worked with them.

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The problem with 'design' and websites

2010-03-06: Here's a video that illustrates perfectly what's wrong with web development led by graphic design (it's a bit flaky in it's delivery, btw, so hit refresh if it doesn't work first time).

I've not got a problem with good design, who could have? That would be like having a problem with tasty food or great music.

Many people are lazy about how they think about design. Perhaps designers encourage it. It's nice to think you're cool, and if you're going to be a designer you really ought to embody your practice. That leads to choosing great products like cars, clothes, and phones which .. is kinda cool. So maybe it's just part of being a designer. And perhaps people think if they knock around with designers some of the cool might rub off on them. So, designers look cool and have lots of people to hang out with. What's wrong with that?

The book I'm reading at the moment talks much more about design for the uncool, the disadvantaged, the poor, and the disabled. So now I'm more interested.

Let's give that video some hassle. Looking at how the user interacts with that screen, poking and gesturing, I get irritated. Do any of you use a screen like that? Do you like working that way? It really looks like I'd feel it was an effort to use a screen by poking at it. I think it's because moving your hand and arm like that requires a shift in musculature throughout your torso. Whereas with a mouse, your hand is already rested over it. Subconsciously, it's a big deal to move your whole arm just to turn a page. So you won't want to do it. So using a tablet is irritating, not a pleasure. Which puts you in the wrong frame of mind to browse lifestyle articles and magazines.

This, though, is the big, fundamental issue with the video. He talks about the user interface (UI), and it's clear he's a designer, perhaps a graphic designer. But it's as if the UI is a higher level of graphic design .. and it isn't. Human computer interaction is a huge field where huge disciplines like psychology, information architecture, and usability and accessibility stuff meet.

For instance, he keeps demonstrating the horizontal scroll to more content, but half the time he ends up at that car ad. There seems to be nothing on the screen that tells you what you're scrolling to. That breaks a fundamental rule of usability, that the user should know what will happen when they choose an option, and when they arrive on the next screen, it should be basically what they expected .. no surprises.

The demonstration seems to imagine a Halifax CardCash kinda world where people have the spare time and inclination to sit with a gadget and try to read a magazine on it and the brand of the magazine they are trying to read is so trusted that we'd pore over every page, letting the editor and publisher lead us wherever they want. That's an advertising person's dream, but it's not real.

Let's strip out the idea that someone would sit and read some glossy lifestyle magazine on a tablet like this. We'd be more likely to browse YouTube or Facebook. I mean .. we absolutely do sit and browse through stuff on our computers, letting the wind blow us wherever it may, but .. and here's the thing .. underneath both of those experiences is a whole heapload of programming that provides us what we want. "You like that? Then you'll love this." He makes no mention of the enormous amount of work and yes, design, that goes into making that happen. Do you think YouTube would be as engaging without it?

There's personalisation. People new to YouTube may not have seen Maru the cat, but for others they've seen the top 100 funny videos on YouTube and they want something more. Two users, two different desires. YouTube presents them both with different content because it knows something about what they like. That makes it engaging .. because it's showing each of us what we want to see.

So what's groovy about carrying around some form of handheld computer is that it provides what we want, when we want it.

When I went to that meeting of the Yorkshire Mafia the other day, I prepared by checking where the hotel was. The postcode in Google Maps puts it at Leeds Railway Station, and I used to live in Leeds so I thought no more about it. As I drove in at night in the rain from an unfamiliar direction, I got lost. When I found the station, I couldn't find the hotel. The static station information didn't tell me. The interactive screens didn't tell me. Tourist information had closed for the night. There was no-one from the station who looked like they might help. The WiFi seemed to need a login. And I couldn't see the hotel nearby. Turns out it wasn't really nearby at all, and it was a new-build. I had to ask four people to reach it. That's what you want a handheld computer for, and if it took you by a route where you were less likely to get mugged that would be nice.

What if I were in Japan? I'd need internationalisation.

I haven't got a problem with aspiration, and I understand that advertising has to appeal to our lizard brains in order to work, that's absolutely fine.

But this video isn't an ad. Actually, maybe I'm wrong about that. Perhaps it really is. And in that context, fine, advertise what you do, it's a great ad, so long as you make clear what you're doing isn't really user interface design in any whole sense. You're designing the look and feel of a user interface. That's not the whole story by a long way. It's not even the hardest, most heroic or most interesting part. It's the way you've painted the house. I'm much more interested in the house, its location, its services and its community.

So if it isn't an ad, my fundamental problem is that this doesn't seem to be addressed to any problem anyone's actually got. It's a top-down, brand and business-led imagining of how corporations might be able to sell to us in the future. More than that, it's a design company's pitch for how they might help corporations use new technology to improve their business. It depicts a cosy world where business calls all the shots and we just spend our money on Porsche branded sneakers.

Or as a friend put it: "it's like annoying electronic doors and windows where a door knob and a hinge would have done nicely. 'We're doing it because we can'. Beyond that, no justification nor use. Will it 'save the planet', less paper, less ink, less chemicals. No, just even more south africans and koreans down pits searching for precious metals to power the computer, more wars, more instability, on and on .. so .. it's bollocks really. But it will happen because it can. And for someone returning from one of the war regions full of precious metals with all their limbs blown off, I guess not having to turn pages in a mag will actually, one day, be of use after they have stopped weeping".

If it's design, if it's business, surely it should address a need. That's the whole point .. we come to work every day to solve people's problems in a way they can discover and afford. Their problems. We solve people's problems. That's what makes for a better world. That's the promise of free market capitalism. It spots a need and solves it and thereby improves society.

There's no reason I would want what's shown (even if it were free), it would be irritating to use, I wouldn't use it the way they want me to use it, it doesn't do what I want, and it appears to corral the design of a user interface as a graphic design job (which it absolutely isn't). But it looks nice, so that's OK then.

Incidentally, I'm not trying to kill all graphic designers here, I'm just tackling that video. Funnily enough as I was writing this I did keep thinking about Electric Angel, the efforts Adrian's made .. with Chart Scarborough to understand urban navigation and in the railway project looking into the history, to try to look into things more deeply. Of course, you have to deliver something that looks nice and the budget probably doesn't usually provide for much research, but I actually think Adrian's got soul, does the right things. So I'm really not knocking designers. I'm knocking that video.

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The very beginnings of a blog index

2010-07-29: The very beginnings of a blog index

Obviously there's some tidying to do, but the basic mechanisms are there, word splitting, stoplist, simple display. I'll tidy it as I go.

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Mirror inspiration

2010-07-14: It's been a while since I've taken inspiration from the Daily Mirror (John Pilger's revelations on Idi Amin come to mind) and I'm not given to liking page layouts, but I have to say I rather like the Daily Mirror's.

It's based on a grid of squares forming six columns (you can click the above pic if you want a bigger version to look at) or of course you can look at the real thing (but it might have changed since I wrote this blog .. it will be interesting to compare).

The very top line has some stuff I don't understand, so we'll skip merrily over that. Next is a bit of centering and localisation: date, time, weather. Of course once you enter your location they have some demographics and localisation stuff about you which helps them target their business.

Then we have the masthead followed by a top level menu which divides the newspaper into the themed pages .. so if you're the sort of person who reads a newspaper from the back (ie. sport first), then you can do that with the top menu.

After that, hot topics, so some quick links to where the buzz is. It's a newspaper after all.

Next up, some squares which function a bit like ads .. graphic tempters to get us to click and dive in to the newspaper. The text is nicely formatted, nothing fancy, and the button style is straightforward and anchors the eye nicely, even though it exists in various colour combinations it's always in the same place, and always the same shape.

Those colours are themed. Yellow is news, cerise is celebrity, and green is sport.

On this screencapture, the yellow headline and the text underneath is rather obscured and doesn't work well. When I decided this layout was working well (on a Mac) those yellow headlines stood out more so I wonder if, on my browser, I'm missing a transparent background maybe. There are a few varieties of this text, the 'porn addiction' headline shows one variation, and the Holly Willoughby one another. The 'football challenge' one looks a bit wayward.

Yeah, here's how it looks on a newish Mac: . Testing, my friends (it works lower down so it's not a lacking capability of my browser).

The main news item has a variation all of its own using the striking classic combination of black, white and red for impact.

The first three columns seem to contain hard news, the 4th column more lifestyle items and the final two columns contain ads, which is also where the ad is in the masthead. This allows the user to filter that content out until they want it.

So given those graphical rules, those items can be delivered by software objects, and the re-arrangement can be automated according to how many clicks. That might be how we would do it, but I'm tempted to think that newspaper people would want control of that. They know what they are doing on the page, they do it every day.

After another row of ads, we have six squares of celebrity news .. this time the headlines and copy do have a background colour.

After that, six themed columns. Again these stories' positions could be automatically calculated from clicks or placed there by whoever's in charge of those pages. Each has a small image for the eye to land on, and a few words of link text. Check the text .. is it tempting? Do you write your headlines that well? What tricks do they use to tempt us in?

Then we are into another space .. it's a bit like passing through a hedge at the end of a long garden to find the vegetable patch. Here we have three double columns, one which is explicit about showing the stories that readers are interacting with the most. Then it's popular videos. Then popular pictures.

The hot topics menu is back again (it's the same as the one above), and then we are into the links for specific parts of the newspaper and website .. here's where you would go if you want something specific, the crossword or agony aunt, for instance. Interestingly, they are happy to break the six column layout here.

Finally there are links to, I presume, co-operating businesses or businesses the group owns: 'find a job', etc. and then then usual page 'furniture' links.

In terms of user journeys, part of the function of a newspaper is to provide us with interesting news so, perhaps unusually, we often go to a newspaper site in order to be distracted, to see what's happening. However for those who are there for 'sport', 'politics' or specific sections of the paper, those links are available. Other desired journeys will be linked to news stories: "have they caught the killer yet?", "what's the cricket score?", "why was the M4 blocked this morning?" and will often be satisfied by those graphic news links.

I just think as a way of organising an awful lot of information (the output of 554 editorial staff working over three publications: the Daily Mirror, the Sunday Mirror and The People), it works rather well.

It appears some of the journalists' judgment is being automated, according to this story about redundancies at the Mirror group.

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Camping vlog

2010-08-04: We've been camping, and never being one to miss an opportunity I thought I'd practice presenting to camera by doing a video blog.

Basically the idea was to just be myself and see how that came across and then work from there on anything that needs improvement.

So I'm afraid I'll be uploading videos of my in various states of hair-related distress, but this first one is a shot in the dark. No, really, it was the middle of the first night and pouring with rain. Sadly my capability to record high quality sound failed me (I wanted a recording of rain in a tent .. evocative), so I thought I'd do a video instead. Sound quality .. mic -> Flip -> YouTube is appalling. Oh well.

Anyway, I promise the next videos will be better :-)

(I sound like a dork. Action point #1: get a better voice)

Camping blog: next

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XMRV news

2010-07-01: As you may recall, in October last year Science magazine published research by the privately funded Whittemore Peterson Institute (WPI) (the owners' daughter has CFS) in which a virus called XMRV was linked for the first time with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS).

XMRV is a retrovirus, which is a virus that doesn't trigger the normal immune response and so once you've got it, you've got it for life. HTLV1 (which comes out as leukaemia) and HIV (AIDS) are the other human retroviruses.

All that said was: in people with CFS there's a much higher incidence of XMRV. It doesn't prove cause, either way.

But it is incredibly important. CFS in the UK is treated as a mental illness. If it turns out it's a virus, people will want to know if you can catch it and it leads to thoughts of a possible cure or at least more effective treatment.

So the next step in the scientific process is to replicate the study to make sure it's really true.

Here in the UK CFS policy is guided by Simon Wessely who has his career staked on it being a mental illness. He sponsored a quick study that predictably found no correlation. WPI say he didn't use their methods so it's not a true replication.

In the last few days the CFS community has gotten all excited again because another attempt at replicating the WPI study came up with the same link. It was all due to be published and we were expecting to wake up the next morning to a changed world when .. what's this? Another study, saying no .. no link.

And the US government has put the publication of both papers on hold pending an explanation. That seems to be unusual.

Why would the US government do that? Because if the XMRV link is proved, if XMRV causes CFS (and possibly a whole bunch of other stuff too like MS), and if 7% of us have XMRV, are we not going to be close to mass panic? All the blood in the blood banks will need to be checked at least.

It does seem sensible to manage the situation. But the CFS community is very worried the truth will be covered up. Naturally, I trust that it won't but I should face the facts: we have Wessely, and he's been blocking the truth for years. In the age of austerity, I can't say I'm not concerned that there might be a motivation to sweep this potentially huge cost under the carpet if we consider the alternative might be punishment by the financial markets if we overspend (pain for few -v- pain for everyone).

I don't know if now is the time to shout loud. But this is coming, and when we understand fully its prevalence and effects, it will probably be bigger than AIDS.

WSJ story

Update 2 July 2010: It appears the negative paper has been published, but there's no date for the positive one (Science).

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Your search traffic is much more diverse than you think

2010-02-20: I've never met a new client that has a real idea of the breadth of the keyphrases that will be, or are being, used to find their website.

Usually if I ask what keyphrases they'd like to be on the first page of Google for, they say "Bosch power tools" or similar. Which is fine, but many of my clients are startups or are struggling for their first main search engine position. On page one for "Bosch power tools" are established businesses.

To give you an idea, for "taxi insurance", I know others are spending £6,000 a month on search engine marketing (SEO (Optimisation)).

Locally, a chain of plush hotels are employing a full time SEO person. So even if they only pay them £15k that's probably £25k of costs or £2k a month .. and is that level of salary going to give them great SEO?

For a client of mine who gets 1,000 website visitors per month, 81% of those are from natural search and there were 11,379 different search phrases used to successfully find their site. So there are probably many more keyphrases they could get traffic from but where they don't have a good search engine position. That's more than twenty completely different keyphrases every day for a year. That client doesn't even blog and isn't on any social media sites ("too busy, don't believe in it"), so that's just from the content I created for their website.

So, as a startup business, how do you get a foothold?

You could pick a longer keyphrase to target: "mobile phone GPS tracking software" seems long enough to give you a chance at the first page, if that's what you sell.

But the problem is, with those longer keyphrases there are almost infinite combinations. For mobile, try cellular or Nokia. For phone try PDA. For GPS try satellite. For tracking try location. For software try download. That's 48 combinations before we start. How can you manage all that?

The best way might be to start blogging. Or at least Tweeting. Or at least changing your Facebook Page status every now and then.

Because if you blog about what you do with half a mind towards your keyphrases, you'll naturally write about the things people are searching for and long search phrases will exist naturally in your writing. That's true because those long phrases aren't particularly competitive, so even just one mention could get you onto page one of Google.

It means you can just write, not worry about keyphrases at all, and it'll all fall beautifully into place (given time).

Perhaps someone will find this blog who has £6k a month to spend on SEO for their taxi insurance business. Particularly now I've mentioned it twice.

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Reputation management

2010-08-12: Eeeh, marketers do talk some rubbish sometimes.

Basically according to that article reputation management is a search engine optimisation problem. If people search on your name, do they find the good stories or the bad ones first? That's solved with straightforward SEO skills. If you were an actor or a professor or a manager and came to me for help promoting yourself online, that's obviously part of what I would do. I just wouldn't call it an online detox.

Of course it's a little more complicated for companies where the line that separates customers from staff can (and probably should) become completely blurred. There it's the interactions that form the reputation, so everyone has to act consistently according to the company branding.

Anyway, online reputation management. Yes, I do that too :-) Actually, I've been doing it for a while.

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Sorry about this

2010-07-16: Another quote from the very much recommended Talk to the Hand: The Utter Bloody Rudeness of Everyday Life about the lack of please, thank-you, excuse me and sorry in today's language:

Janet Street-Porter, filming a documentary about modern education, "tried to prompt the children at a school assembly to grasp the importance of apology. 'Children,' she said, 'in every family home, there's a word which people find it really hard to say to each other. It ends in 'y'. Can anyone tell me what it is?' There was a pause while everyone racked their brains, and then someone called out 'Buggery?'

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How much to spend on SEO

2010-08-03: I have a client who is in position 8 for a search keyphrase and is making, let's make up some figures .. £2 profit a month from sales from 20 visitors. Is it worth putting in the time to get a higher position?

Based on switching around these figures, it looks to me like work that raised them to position 7 would bring in 13% more traffic. At position 4 traffic doubles. At position 2 it quadruples, and in the top position it is times .. wait for it .. 14!

That makes the annual benefit of putting in the work to be at position 7 £3.12, which doesn't pay for a lot of SEO time.

If we can get to position 4, that's worth £24.48, still not a lot of SEO time.

At the top position, it's £316.56. That pays for a fair bit of SEO time. Winner takes all, basically.

Obviously these are small figures but that's the calculation that small businesses have to make .. is it worth paying an SEO consultant to raise my search position? Well, now, we can work it out.

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This blog entry will self-destruct in 30 seconds

2010-07-12: Urgency is a big sales motivator. We don't like making decisions. I was looking at the quote "If I had to choose, I'd rather have birds than aeroplanes" (among a load of anti BP t-shirts on a site that wasn't this one) and I thought .. we really don't like choices, we'll do anything to have both.

We dislike loss more than we like what we might gain. Making a choice means saying 'no' to something in order to gain something else. If we can somehow avoid making the choice, it means we get to keep both options open for longer.

In sales, we need to force that decision to be made, preferably while we are around (otherwise the next salesman will force it) and a time limit is one technique we can use.

If we are presented with a one-day sale, well, the decision has to be made today. So here are some ways to bring some urgency to your website:

• Use phrases like "click here now", "last day", or "special time-limited offer" in your copy
• Cross out the old price before putting the 'offer' price.
• Be clear about the deadline: add the date, a countdown, or an 'ends today' flash.

Whatever you do, make sure the reason to buy now is clear.

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Robot World Cup team

2010-07-11: The average life expectancy of a man in Yorkshire is 77, so I've 29 years left, taking me to 2039 which means I might not get to see a team of robot footballers win the World Cup.

That's the goal of the RoboCup, a competition whose aim is "By mid-21st century, a team of fully autonomous humanoid robot soccer players shall win the soccer game, complying with the official rule of the FIFA, against the winner of the most recent World Cup."

Autonomous: that means once you set your players on the field there's no human contact. So these robots can not only play football (see the ball and the goal, stand up, stand on one leg to kick, get up if they fall over, maybe jump and head the ball, anticipate the ball's position), but can think for themselves and co-ordinate intentions with others in their team to attack and defend .. better than the best human team.

Here's the 2009 final:

Did anyone see Titan on Big Brother?

Anyway, I was just thinking. To experience the thrill and motivation of winning, maybe the robots could play against England's current team and build up from there.

Enjoy today. I'll be supporting Spain.

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Value is in the eye of the customer

2010-08-05: Here's an interesting bit of Eisenbergs' (yep, plural) Call to Action: Secret Formulas to Improve Online Results about customer value.

The basic idea is that on the web, people arrive at your website voluntarily and they make a judgment about the value you might bring to them. That judgment exists entirely in their head. They decide what 'value' means to them, and then they look to see if you can provide it. That's another way of saying your visitors want what they want and are goal focussed when browsing.

"The customer", he says "readily must be able to determine your value to them; they shouldn't have to guess".

He goes on to say that 'successful Web site designers' have a high degree of empathy for visitors and their values, and that comes out in that they:

• sell something people want
• entice and coax, they don't coerce
• don't assume their visitors know things, but they don't talk down to them either
• present information as needed
• anticipate questions
• emphasise benefits
• write so the page can be found in search engines
• use hyperlinks that contain benefits and questions/answers

The thing is, those things go into my head and kinda fizzle out. It's no-news.

It comes alive, though, as a checklist when you have a context. For instance, someone arrived at my blog about Facebook ads using the search keyphrase "examples of facebook ad copy". They bounced because it's not immediately obvious that I'm going to provide what they want (they're right, I don't). That's not an issue for me because I feel they are probably not a potential client, but a fellow practitioner.

So that's the point. We need to start with a clear idea of who we are selling to. So that's strategic marketing stuff about your position in the market, your value proposition and yes, a very clear and specific idea about who you are selling to. Then we need to think about what sorts of things they might want help with and how they might search for those things.

Once we know that we can look at what happens when someone searches on our target phrases. On which page do they land? Then, with our target person in mind and with a specific instance of a search (or hopefully a flow of searches) and a landing page to consider, we can decide whether we have satisfied that checklist above and start to look at the customer journey through our website via payment to the thank-you page and perhaps on to later journeys concerned with delivery tracking and support.

So if that checklist doesn't mean much to you either, perhaps the problem is you need to get specific.

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Show them pictures of food

2010-08-06: Anytime it's relevant, take the opportunity to show people gorgeous photographs of food.

That's because our old brain, the one that makes sure we eat, drink, stay out of danger and do naughty things with people of the opposite sex, likes to see pictures of food (for obvious evolutionary reasons).

What it likes, it promotes to our conscious mind. It's a bit like making friends with a lobbyist in your client's head.

So, show people pictures of food when you can.

All from Neuro Web Design: What Makes Them Click?

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Planeta Moscato Di Noto 2004

2010-08-04: I'm clearing up in my office and that means the empty bottle of wine that's been on my desk for probably over a year waiting for me to have a moment to blog about it .. hang on, 24 December 2008 is when I bought it .. needs to be blogged and binned so here goes.

Basically it was possibly the nicest bottle of wine I've ever tasted. It's a sweet dessert wine that's plumscious, syrupy honey but layers on layers of fruit tastes .. it's just delicious, we got distracted and spent most of the evening sniffing it and trying to name the tastes. Expensive (can't afford it nowadays), but worth it if you want to make an impression, there's a 2007 here.

At last: bottle->bin.

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Utter bloody rudeness

2010-06-30: As documented before, I kinda love Lynne Truss, author of the best selling book Eats, Shoots and Leaves which tells you how to start a war by using the wrong grammar.

Her follow-up Talk to the Hand: The Utter Bloody Rudeness of Everyday Life is equally entertaining.

One thing that made me laugh out loud was her saying that, and I really hope this is true, "For some time now, I have been carrying a Sooty glove-puppet on shopping expeditions, so that I can at least have a decent conversation when buying stuff in Ryman's. 'What's that Sooty? That will be £3.99? What's that Sooty? Thank you very much? What's that Sooty? Goodbye?"

Interestingly, she also offers this insight into this sort of thing: "The once-prevalent idea that, as individuals, we have a relationship with something bigger than ourselves .. has become virtually obsolete. For this reason, many people simply cannot see why they shouldn't chuck their empty burger box out of the car window. They also don't see any reason to abide by traffic laws unless there is a speed camera advertised. 'That's so selfish!' is a cry that has no judgmental content for such people, and little other meaning either."

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Twollo auto Twitter follow

2010-06-19: Twollo used to provide a free way automatically to follow people on Twitter based on keywords. When I tweeted I was having a problem with web hosting one day, a hosting company immediately followed me, that's the sort of service Twollo provided.

Of course, once that reached thousands of users it turned into a paid service (a common model), but it also seems to have turned non-automatic in that it provides a list of matching tweets for you to work down and follow yourself. They say their users find that more effective.

I say their users find that more effective because the search is insufficiently good. I want Brits who are off to do some gardening. If I search for garden, I don't want beer garden, Covent Garden, or secret garden, and I don't want Americans.

If Twollo provided those capabilities, then auto-follow would work well. As it stands, I may as well use Twitter search.

So Twollo have failed, first of all, to cater for non-Americans, as is the way sadly with many of these funky new online services. Secondly, either they have decided their users won't or can't use negative words in a search, or they've simple pushed the problem to their users by asking them to manually check each matching tweet.

It's possible Twitter closed the accounts of too many of their customers for spamming.

The argument that users can't use negative words in a search is unsustainable because Google provides it. If I want to search 'garden' but not 'Covent' in Google the search is 'Garden -Covent'. If I know it's there I can use it, if I'm a naive user I don't have to worry about it.

So it must just be that they haven't bothered to provide that functionality.

That's understandable if they are making no money at it. Their costs could be quite large if they want to drink in the whole of the Twitterstream.

But .. businesses that make no money close down so that's unsustainable.

So, that just leaves that they either don't know an advanced search is required, which would be really surprising, or they consider usability and internationalisation to be insufficiently important. If it's the latter .. well .. don't waste my time.

I wonder how many clients like me they lose through de-prioritising usability and internationalisation.

As for Twitter auto-follow services, I guess they are being provided to blue chip companies as part of expensive corporate communications tools. Pity, the Internet was supposed to be for the small guys too. I'll have a mooch around.

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FourSquare is pants

2010-06-13: They say Foursquare is the next big thing and in principle, they are probably right. Basically, it's a geography driven interactive space where people can leave notes for others who arrive at the same location later.

I think it's got people's attention because it's clearly usable by businesses wanting people to leave messages to future others about buying, for instance, expensive menu items. In other words, it seems easily spammable by those into using social media for gain and where business sees gain it pours resources, so Foursquare rises on that.

I really want it to be great. Wouldn't it be good to be able to see where your friends are of an evening?

But it plain doesn't work. It doesn't work so very badly that I'm amazed anyone's talking about it at all.

Foursquare says 'find people, places, tags [search]' so I enter 'Scarborough' and it says 0 venues, 0 tips, 25 people, 0 tags. Sorry no results found. You're near Salisbury.

For those who don't know, Salisbury is about 400 miles away. The Salisbury it thinks I'm near is in Canada. That's a few thousand miles away. It didn't ask me. I have to click on it before it asks where I am and I can set it to Scarborough UK. OK. For a geographic system, wouldn't it be nice if it either guessed right or asked that most crucial bit of information. Are you in Salisbury? No, I'm in Scarborough, but I forgive you. Fabulous.

So now we are over that, there are 16 locations on FourSquare. For a town of 60,000 people, 16 locations and 3 tips isn't going to turn anyone's business around.

It's a serious issue. Now the Web 2.0 revolution has happened and there are multitudinous ways for people to contribute to the Internet, to share their lives and make everything better for everyone, it turns out no-one can be arsed barring a few people who would probably rather be in the future than their present.

Following the latest thing is all right, but as a marketer, I need to be where the mass of people are. For now, that's Facebook and to a lesser extent Twitter. I wish FourSquare well. Might even play with it myself.

Update: I went to the Woodend Creative Workspace to see Jehan for Open Studios and that wasn't a location on FourSquare so I added it. Got that? Scarborough, most enterprising town in Europe, with a university department pouring out maybe thirty Internet graduates every year .. the place designed for them to work in .. no-one there had registered that location (I'm criticising FourSquare, not you guys).

There was no FourSquare client for my phone. That despite me not being awkward with my choice of phone: it's Windows Mobile, a mainstream phone acquired so I could run someone else's software.

Then I went to the Golden Ball pub on the harbour, and I checked in on Foursquare Mobile. Earlier for Woodend on my desktop it wanted their postcode, address, phone number. For the Golden Ball it just accepted my checkin. I thought it was being clever, knowing that on a mobile it's harder to get such data.

When I got home, it had checked me in at the Golden Ball, York. Unless I had a jetpack, for a geographically based site, I'd have thought it might know there was no way for me to get from Woodend to a pub in York in such a short time. Anyway, that was wrong, so I deleted it.

Now FourSquare is showing I've been nowhere and done nothing.

This is a screamer for task analysis. Either that or the application of common sense. I mean, come on guys if this is meant to be the future, software that doesn't work 100% of the time, we seriously need to talk.

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Maggi Hambling's Scallop

2008-11-26: We did manage to see Maggi Hambling's Scallop on the way back from visiting our friends. here's how you usually see it in 'the brochure', as it were. Here's my version:

.. so what we didn't realise is there's a scallop base ..

.. which forms a shelter ..

(necessary against the driving wind), and then there's the whole 'representation of the sea' thing

We loved it. Consider, it's about 15 feet tall .. it looks small in situ, but get close and it's big. And we'd never have gone to Aldeburgh if it wasn't for that. We spent probably a tenner around town, and very nearly a lot more, the town's really nice to wander around, so Maggi caused a little bit of extra business from us in Aldeburgh. I still deeply resent The Wave, the idea for Scarborough, that didn't get through. We got the awful Diving Belle and whatever that lump is outside Woolworths. Wrong.

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The latest pics of window boxes

2010-05-29: So, does this work:

www.flickr.com

It's supposed to be a Flickr Badge showing the latest pics tagged with 'window boxes'.

So I wanted to test if it changed over time ..

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