Monday, January 14, 2008

Forrester: Huge Room For Website Improvement

Forrester has reviewed over 1000 websites since 2002, and only 3 percent have passed their test. That means 97 percent failed! That leaves plenty of room for improvement. According to Forrester, the biggest culprits are a lack of proper scenario design, and poor or non-existing persona development. Without these two important tools, it’s easy for a website to get off on the wrong foot leading to frustrations for everybody—especially the user.

Forrester commented in one of their research reports that a well-planned and executed website redesign can have a huge payback with a positive ROI achieved over a short period of time.

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Friday, January 11, 2008

Guy Kawasaki Video: Measurement and Metrics Will Drive Marketing Programs in 2008

Author, marketer, A-list blogger, venture capitalist, and entrepreneur Guy Kawasaki is interviewed by Jeremiah Owyang at Forrester. See the video on the Forrester Marketing Blog.

Guy says measurement and metrics will be big in 2008. He also talks about entrepreneurism and how he uses social media to drive business for his company, Truemors.

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Thursday, January 10, 2008

Entrepreneurship and The Curse of Knowledge

A recent article in the New York Times purported that as we acquire more knowledge, our creativity and our ability to innovate diminishes. The reason is the Curse of Knowledge: “The better we get at generating great ideas—new insights and novel solutions—in our field of expertise, the more unnatural it becomes for us to communicate those ideas clearly to others.” In addition, once someone acquires a certain amount of knowledge in a given area, the more difficult it becomes to see outside the box of the self-made constructs they’ve created to deepen their understanding.

It’s a powerful argument and it seems to be borne out if you look at many venture capitalists: they rarely invest in companies started by anyone past their 30s. VCs are looking for people with bold ideas that can be evangelized and clearly communicated to others. There’s more on this youth/knowledge/entrepreneurial thing here.

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Shoeperstar Winner - A blog contest about… blogging

While this is a little off from my usual topic of Software Reliability and Maintainability, it was still too interesting not to blog about.  Big name internet marketers Ted Murphy of Izea and Jeremy Schoemaker of ShoeMoney are putting on a contest to determine the next Shoeperstar Winner.  To win, bloggers have to, well, blog about why they think they should be the Shoeperstar.  It presents a very interesting example of the power of viral marketing and SEO.  All of the blog entries will undoubtedly link back to both Izea and ShoeMoney, further bolstering there already impressive SEO rankings.

Former Sundogger and rising blogosphere star Max Pool of Code Squeeze has thrown his name into the ring with his entry, 10 Reasons Why I Am A Shoeperstar Contest Winner.

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Tuesday, January 08, 2008

Widgets, Widgets Everywhere

Widgets, those mini-software applications, that you can download and embed on web pages, are on a tear, and most of them are coming from third-party developers. Some examples are applications such as iLike, Bunchball Games and Picnik. Forbes recently highlighted the explosive growth of widgets in this recent article. To illustrate this growth, Forbes cites the story of Facebook, which opened its platform to third party developers in May of 2007 and now has nearly 13,000 widgets available that have been downloaded 765 million times.

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